Meetings have always been a crucial part of running a successful company. In today’s digital age, however, these conversations often take place in virtual environments. Successful interactions between teams are enabled by video, audio, and content sharing technology.
Hybrid teams, remote workers, and companies investing in digital transformation have various exceptional meeting solutions to choose from. Today, we’re going to be looking at two of the most compelling options available: Avaya Spaces, and Zoom.
While Zoom is best-known for its video-first approach to collaboration, Avaya brings amazing audio quality and global reliability to all kinds of meeting interactions.
Avaya Spaces: Features
Let’s start by looking at the features you can expect from Avaya Spaces. Avaya stands out as one of the better-known brands in the communication landscape, promising everything from global reach for your audio calls to powerful cloud storage. The Avaya Spaces offering includes everything companies need to keep teams connected.
With Avaya Spaces, you can build a comprehensive collaboration space, with rich chat and messaging, file sharing, task management, video conferencing and more. At the same time, you get access to Avaya’s powerful range of IP phones and hardware tools. Avaya Spaces features include:
- Custom collaboration spaces
- File and screen sharing with file previews in chat
- Rich messaging with lists, bullets, and code blocks
- Recording for video and audio calls
- Activity stream notifications and alert
- Comprehensive search for all spaces
- Meeting and conferencing for up to 1,000 participants
- Video meetings with a range of layouts
- Video acceleration with NVIDIA GPUs
- Meeting moderation and control
- Task management and project assignment
- Rich calling with WebRTC on a browser
- Avaya enterprise telephony integrations
- Artificial intelligence for background blur, replacement, and noise elimination
- A simple user interface in 26 languages
Zoom Features
If Avaya’s reputation builds on top of its powerful position as a communication service provider, Zoom’s image is all about simple, innovative video. Zoom created its meetings and collaboration platform to support companies wanting to tap into video-first communication, without the headaches. Users can access HD video at the click of a button, with inline translation and powerful AI features.
You can launch Zoom video meetings from anywhere, with a consistent experience across all devices. Support is available for virtual backgrounds, and audio enhancement. Plus, although Zoom doesn’t have its own dedicated hardware portfolio, like Avaya, it does partner with other market-leading innovators to give you the endpoints you need. Features of Zoom include:
- Simple browser-based meetings and conversations on any device
- VoIP access through Zoom phone with local service in 17 countries
- Immersive video meetings with virtual backgrounds
- Extensive video streaming settings and webinars
- Calendar integrations to help you connect with colleagues
- Transcription and translation features
- Zoom hardware and meeting rooms
- Zoom waiting rooms and breakout spaces
- Multi-share to share two screens at the same time
- Personal meeting room customisations
- Intelligent tools to touch up your video appearance
- Integrations with world-leading tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Simple collaboration and file sharing via chat
- Workspaces for content sharing and alerts
- Healthcare, government, education and finance dedicated options
- Developer platform with APIs and SDKs
Zoom vs Avaya Spaces: User Experience
A quick glance at the feature lists for Zoom and Avaya Spaces shows that both tools are built to make life easier for collaborating companies. Zoom was designed to make video meetings easier for everyone, and it accomplishes this with simple meetings anyone can join, one-click setup, calendar integration, and a host of integrations too.
Avaya is well-known for its ability to keep people and companies connected. Avaya’s global reach makes it an excellent choice for a wide range of companies. You can connect your solution to your existing communication hardware and create ad-hoc meetings with WebRTC technology.
Zoom’s user experience caters to a new generation of hybrid and remote workers relying on video to stay connected. There are tons of features dedicated to enhancing video experience, from touch up for your video streams to make you feel more confident, to waiting rooms and breakout rooms for better meeting control and management.
Avaya concentrates on ensuring everyone can continue to communicate wherever they are, without compromising on safety and security. Avaya is built from the ground up with encryption and security settings built-in, so you have peace of mind for every meeting. Avaya even allows people to interact easily without downloading external tools, thanks to WebRTC technology.
Both Avaya and Zoom can help you to build the perfect customised meeting experience from scratch, with access to everything from native tools, to API developer kits.
Zoom vs Avaya Spaces: Integrations
Zoom and Avaya both offer companies a range of ways to build out the perfect meeting or productivity portfolio. With Zoom, your integration options start with a wide selection of Zoom-certified hardware products for the meeting room. You can create comprehensive Zoom Rooms, complete with video and audio bars, dedicated personal webcams, and virtual whiteboards.
Zoom works with some of the biggest innovators in hardware creation to bring teams the most intuitive experience, wherever they’re working from. Outside of the hardware environment, Zoom plays well with a range of other brands, supported by the expansive Zoom app marketplace and Zoom Apps designed specifically for a native performance within Zoom.
Avaya’s integration options aren’t as extensive as what you can expect from Zoom, but you can still access everything you need for amazing meetings. Avaya has its own dedicated IP tools and hardware, so you can get your software and endpoints from the same brand with one bill to worry about. Avaya also integrates with some of the leading productivity tools.
You can access Google, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Enterprise SSO, Slack, Teams, and a range of other products with Avaya Spaces. There’s also access to the Avaya CPaaS and API environment for building your own connections. Zoom has its own API solution too.
Should You Choose Zoom or Avaya Spaces?
Both Avaya Spaces and Zoom are excellent tools for the new era of work. Choosing the right option for your needs means thinking carefully about what you want to accomplish as a brand. For instance, if you’re focused heavily on video meetings, Zoom probably makes the most sense for you.
Zoom offers quick and easy access to video meetings, no matter where your employees are. You can build entire Zoom Rooms for hybrid meetings, or even host your own webinars.
Avaya, on the other hand, makes sense as a collaboration solution for companies in search of global reach and reliability. You can easily link your collaboration tool to existing Avaya investments too, such as hardware, and even contact centre solutions.
