Avaya’s EDP offers smart foundation for communication framework: Vijay Mhaskar

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Avaya has come up with an Engagement Development Platform (EDP) for government and businesses to develop applications tailored to their needs and create differentiated value with existing investments. In an interview with EC’s Mohd Ujaley, Vijay Mhaskar, Senior Director, Pune R&D, Avaya India says, “A robust engagement platform is key for the success of government’s and enterprise’s communication framework.”

Avaya has come up with an Engagement Development Platform (EDP). How this will help government and enterprise in setting up their communication framework?
While the concept of Unified Communication (UC) is not new EDP opens up the UC infrastructure and makes it available to enterprises and government to develop applications tailored to their individual needs, creating differentiated value with existing investments. With EDP it is possible to access key information from any mobile application. For example, a specialised sales expert or financial advisor can be tapped by a front line executive using a mobile application that can fetch information from ‘enterprise presence server’ using EDP. In addition to this, EDP is created specifically to cater to the key problems involved in developing communication-enabled business applications. Using the EDP, we have also developed a solution that enables the state government with helplines and emergency numbers to instantly and accurately identify the location of the caller. With such innovations we aim at creating a mobile engagement environment and drive our goal of creating a smart foundation for the fast evolving market in India. Our vision for the Avaya EDP is to create a single integrated application platform that works in conjunction with any device or system, enabling enterprises and developers to build and deploy collaboration and customer engagement applications in days without prior communication development skills.

What benefits will organisation be getting if they adopt the EDP? Will there be any substantial impact on their Capex or Opex?
Large enterprise customers are often looking to customise and automate the business processes in order to best serve their customers. A vital piece that gets left out of this customisation is capability to communicate with their customers using the enterprise communication infrastructure. In spite of investing heavily into their own communication infrastructure, enterprises have to contract out the capability to communicate (automated calls, SMS notifications, and video collaborations). With EDP, the investments in their own UC infrastructure can be better utilised and RoI will increase immensely.

Both government institutions and enterprises have made huge investment in legacy system. It would be tough for them to overhaul or move instantly. How challenging is this aspect for the adoption of EDP?
EDP is built on top of existing ‘Avaya Aura’ components and does not require “rip and replace” of the systems. Upgrading to latest releases of components will get the users to the latest features, improved performance and secure system and also enable EDP.  EDP uses modern programming languages that is aligned with programming environments which social, mobile and cloud developers use today, including JSON, XML and REST. Also, most cloud, mobile and social developers have little to no knowledge of legacy communications. Hence, we have developed EDP in such manner that it does not require any telephony or Computer telephony integration (CTI) skills, but it still provides a rich set of enterprise-grade communication capabilities.

There is growing culture of startups in India. How they can use EDP to leapfrog?
We believe that with the digital transformation in India, people are evolving themselves and are adapting to a very technology savvy life.  Majority of the startups in India are providing web and mobility solutions and need integration with the communication framework. We are enabling a series of partners so that they can help integrate applications with the communication framework. The ease of development and deployment of ‘Communication Enabled Business Applications’ should help smaller and larger enterprises equally to benefit from it Our platform is the perfect technology for the startups as they need mobility in the absence of a permanent infrastructure. The Snap-in feature within EDP removes the burden of manually entering conference numbers and long teleconferencing bridge codes thus facilitating creating a mobile engaged platform and ensuring ease of access and enhanced mobility while on the move.

What role EDP could play in managing communication framework for Digital India?
EDP has strong role to play in providing a robust communication framework for everyone. Basically it helps in the integration of communication framework with government processes and workflows. For example, a city emergency system needs a strong communication backend. In “one click” emergency services like fire brigade, hospital, police could be alerted and their services can be coordinated and all these services are integrated with Avaya’s EDP. We at Avaya believe that, communication is the center of the universe and it touches almost every process be it in the business or government.

What are the key areas that are driving the demand for EDP?
EDP as a platform attracts almost all verticals. We have observed the tractions in organisations across e-commerce, financial institutions, governments & PSU’s, IT Services and manufacturing. It makes it very easy for customers to build “communication enabled business applications” i.e. custom applications across verticals depending on specific requirements. The main challenge in front of telecom service providers, banks, retailers (online and offline), hospitality is to provide on demand access to service to their customers in a location, channel and device agnostic way and with EDP, this can be done very easily.

How secure is your platform?
EDP is a platform for application developers to quickly develop and deploy applications that can harness the capabilities of underlying Avaya Aura UC infrastructure. The EDP platform is secured and hardened following the industry prescribed security guidelines and standards like those from JITC (Department of Defense, US). EDP provides APIs that let developers encrypt using AES and SHA-2 algorithms; authentication and authorization against the enterprise directories and Single Sign-on thereby securing the applications developed on EDP.

How has been overall performance of India in overall Avaya Scheme of Things?
Avaya is long established player in the region both from the perspective of our UC/CC and networking solutions. We have great presence of R&D in India with 35% of Avaya R&D being done in India. Avaya’s latest innovation, the Avaya SDN Fx has been majorly developed out of the R&D center in Bangalore. Avaya India has more than 30% of product and solution development from the Pune, Hyderabad & Bangalore R&D Hubs. This indicates the importance of our business in India which is contributing towards a significant proportion of the global revenues. Further to this, India operations have also contributed significantly in the revenues of Avaya across all sectors in the past one year including sales, services and R&D. We recognise the potential on India’s young talent pool and we constantly look for forward to hiring and appointments of top talents in the country across the board. We are investing in attracting, building, refreshing talents as a key strategy for growth and to be able to continue being relevant to our customers.

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