Avaya recently announced that it would redesign Avaya Vantage, a tablet-like IP phone and collaboration device. I learned more about the new experience the company said is set to improve how Avaya customers work from home, and I caught up with Steve Brock, OneCloud Marketing Leader, Avaya. Brock said the redesigned version of Avaya Vantage is a home office experience that extends the same experience an employee might have in an office to remote working.
According to Avaya’s recent “Work from Anywhere” survey, 65 percent of companies polled say they have and will continue to add new video conferencing solutions to their tech stacks. “They want to guarantee their workforce can adapt quickly to what is likely to be a long-term trend of home working,” Brock told UC Today.
That same research highlights two growing trends – businesses are focused on providing employees with new and valuable tools to enable remote working. The second trend is that remote working shows no signs of slowing down. Brock said the pandemic gave Avaya a chance to rethink the kind of experiences employees wanted to have. Armed with this knowledge, he said Avaya’s leadership felt ready to refine its dedicated meeting device to help foster such experiences.
Fortunately, Brock added, the recent redesign addresses these trends because customers can manage their time, meetings, and workload from a single device. The dedicated virtual communications and team collaboration device integrates with Avaya Spaces, a part of Avaya’s OneCloud strategy that consists of its UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS solutions. It has a built-in high-definition conferencing camera, wide-band audio, and four microphones, too.
Avaya has also introduced new screen shifting technology to Avaya Vantage. The feature enables content, meeting participants, or both to be shifted to a larger screen based on the meeting dynamics at any given time. If you are presenting content, one touch of the device can also open the same meeting on a laptop to enable the presentation.
Since Avaya Vantage only requires users to have a Wi-Fi connection, you can place the device virtually anywhere in the home. It also supports most headsets, keyboards, mouses, external cameras, and external displays. Avaya Vantage is available via Avaya’s Device as a Service (DaaS) — a delivery model that adds to the offering’s agility and flexibility, letting customers buy what they want when they need it – and you can cancel at any time.
The no-touch plug-and-play nature of setup is another unique selling point, and admin billing can be combined with an Avaya OneCloud Subscription in a unified bill. “Home office solutions require a high level of simplicity – this includes the purchasing, deployment, and IT support experience as well as the user experience. It is Avaya’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for employees to continue to access the same productive communications they have always had in their office as they now increasingly work remotely,” Brock concluded.
It has been a great year for those enabling unified communications and collaboration across the globe. It has been especially a solid year for Avaya. When the company last posted its earnings data on November 17, 2020, it reported revenue of $757 million for the quarter. The former legacy player beat analysts’ expectations of $734.28 million.
