Avaya Expands Range and Reach of Collaborative Learning Opportunities in Higher Education

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - Apr 30, 2012) -

• Avaya Communications and Collaboration solutions simplify and enhance educational experience; drive increased participation by students, faculty and experts located anywhere
• Technology increasingly being adopted by colleges and universities to build and use private, hybrid and public cloud-based collaboration solutions
• AvayaLive™ Engage provides colleges and universities with unique, cloud-based 3D learning environment

Avaya today said that a growing number of colleges and universities are adopting Avaya Collaborative Cloud solutions to reach and engage more students, regardless of their geographic locations. Such technology is simplifying and enhancing the learning environment, while greatly expanding the range and reach of educational opportunities for students globally.

The Avaya Collaborative Cloud is a framework that enables organizations to build, use and enhance public, private and hybrid cloud-based applications using Avaya unified communications, contact center, networking, and services. The solutions will be showcased this week at the 41^st Annual ACUTA Conference & Exhibitions (booth #515), to be held April 29 - May 2 at the JW Marriott Conference Center in Indianapolis, In. ACUTA is the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education.

Amid rising adoption of cloud-based collaborative suites across industries, higher education institutions are increasingly turning to Avaya and its partners for technology-based solutions to better meet changing student needs and more effectively compete for enrollment. Avaya enables colleges and universities to streamline and enhance campus communications and IT infrastructures, creating new learning environments that are Always-On through:

• Campus-wide private and hybrid clouds. Higher education institutions and organizations use Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture to deploy a standards-based private cloud infrastructure that can be extended campus-wide from the data center all the way to the desktop. The Avaya Aura® core communications platform delivers centralized unified communications and contact center applications.
• AvayaLive™ Engage, formerly known as web.alive, is a Web-based, immersive collaboration environment that enables students, faculty and staff to use personalized avatars in a 3D environment to collaborate in meetings and study sessions, and participate in online learning, international studies, distance learning, training and recruiting. AvayaLive Engage was recently awarded a 2012 Ed-Tech Readers' Choice Award in recognition of its advances in online learning technology.
• Avaya DevConnect technology partner, Esna Technologies (Esnatech), seamlessly integrates Avaya's portfolio of unified communications platforms to cloud-based applications, such as Google Apps, VMware Zimbra® and Microsoft® Office 365™ to maximize student collaborative learning and faculty and staff productivity, while providing unified messaging, rich on-hook/off-hook presence, click-to-dial functionality and smartphone integration support.

As a trusted partner to over 5,000 educational institutions globally, Avaya's work in education converges and consolidates voice, data and video networks to deliver a foundation for a more mobile and connected campus. The advanced features of such networks and cloud-based solutions underpin academic and administrative activities to drive student achievement, streamline student services, maximize faculty and staff productivity, and improve campus operational efficiencies.

Supporting Quotes:

"It was important that our Avaya unified communications integrate with both Exchange and Google Apps. Many of our students and adjunct faculty use Google Apps, and through Office-LinX these users have the same UC capabilities such as presence, mobility and messaging as their peers on Exchange." James Tucker, Director of Telecommunications, Park University

"We have redundant Avaya VSP9000s that actively work together. If one goes down, the other one can carry the full load without any impact to our users. We can take a whole series of these core switches down, run updates on them and reboot them. This allows us to upgrade without having to bring the network down. Without this redundancy, trying to update a busy university network such as Temple's that serves 40,000 students and four affiliated hospitals is like trying to perform a heart transplant on someone who is running a marathon."
Timothy O'Rourke, CIO, Temple University

"Networks designed for best-efforts traffic such as email and Internet are no longer adequate for education. With rich multimedia content, high-stakes online assessments, video, BYOD, cloud computing and the real-time movement of virtual machines, education technology leaders now realize the need for networks with much lower latency and guaranteed delivery to underpin always-on learning."
Marc Randall, SVP & GM, Avaya Networking, Avaya

Additional Resources:

• AvayaLive™ Engage
• Avaya Networking
• Avaya Solutions for Education

Tags: Avaya, UC, unified communications, collaboration, distance learning, education, remote classroom, online education, collaboration, higher education, university, college, remote learning

About Avaya:

Avaya is a global leader in business communications and collaboration, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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