Conflicting strategies aired at unified comms show

Avaya was keen to illustrate how confusing and disparate UC has become.

The networking specialist's emerging technologies director Bruce Everest told ZDNet.co.uk that the merging of handheld devices, software applications, networking and telephony had made things "very complicated" for businesses.

"People are looking for an explanation from vendors, and they are getting a different story from each vendor. What I'm seeing is that customers are saying they have too many devices, and not a lot of it talks. None of it is unified," he said. "Microsoft has a solution for presence, IBM has one, we have one. Then you have presence from GPS, with your mobile workers."

Avaya is trying to solve the problem of disparate information with its Integrated Presence Server (IPS). The IPS is intended to gather all the various presence information and, by applying pre-determined rules, give users a cohesive set of information on their colleages' availability.

Everest said it's early days for the product, which was announced in March, but added that it will become vital in the future as UC becomes more ubiquitous and complex to administer.

Everest also outlined an initiative similar to Microsoft's, to allow contact centre agents to reach experts in the rest of the business to help them resolve customers' queries first time.

But he had concerns over how this could be implemented. "If the contact centre gets visibility of the rest of the business, how are we going to handle that? I would hate calls to be transferred to the warehouse. The change needs to come from the top down," said Everest.

Avaya is also interested in digital signage, which is the ability to make an advertising screen interact with an individual. For example, someone could scan the barcode on an advertisment for a music album with their mobile phone and have the album delivered to them by 3G. Or an advertisement for a supermarket could change to an advert for dog food as soon as a person with a dog walked by.

Avaya is far from alone in its interest in digital signage, despite the fact that concept is still far from maturity. Cisco is known to be keeping a close eye on the technology as well.

In terms of present technologies, Avaya used its stand to show off its One-X portal, the browser-based software that provides users with control of their IP telephony phones and mobile devices. Everest demonstrated how calls could be handled across a variety of devices using the portal — from a notebook softphone to desktop IP phones to Wi-Fi phones to the Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch.