During this overview course, we will discuss the Avaya Aura architecture.

For our existing client base, this is an evolutionary architecture that permits them to
evolve at their own pace. For new clients, our SIP-based solution approach
enables network intelligence and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.
Avaya Aura is key for any business that wants a next-generation communications
solution that enables people-centric collaboration.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

A PDF version of the course content is available for your reference. If you would
like to download the student guide, click the Attachments tab.

2012 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

This course is part of a series. To get the most out of this course, we recommend that
you take the Avaya Unified Communications or UC courses in the order shown here.
This course, the Unified Communications Portfolio Overview course is the first course
and an entry point for learning about our UC portfolio; the course title is shown in
bold text on this slide. To see where this course fits into the complete recommended
learning path for the UC APSS credential, click the image thumbnail on the screen.
You will find that the next courses provide additional information that builds off this
foundational course.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

The purpose of this overview is to help Avaya sales teams with an overview of
information about Avaya Aura to understand basic sales positioning around this
architecture. Our goal is to provide you with information that will help you close
more sales of Avaya Unified Communications or UC solutions.
As a salesperson, you should be able to assist your client in visualizing the
integration, capabilities and savings associated with our flagship architecture. That
information begins with this course.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Avaya developed Avaya Aura specifically to address the needs of a people-centric

collaborative enterprise. Avaya Aura optimizes and supports comprehensive unified
communications and contact center solutions for midsize to large enterprises.
Avaya Aura is the key Avaya communications and network architecture foundation
that enables an inherently accessible, connected, productive and responsive
business environment.
Leveraging a revolutionary SIP architecture, Avaya Aura simplifies complex
communications networks, reduces infrastructure costs, and efficiently delivers
voice, video, messaging, presence, and web applications to users at every
location.
Avaya Aura has been designed so that people, not technology, define the user
experience as a basis for collaborative, barrier-free business interactions that will
drive successful business results for our customers.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Here are the components that will typically be used in an Avaya Aura architecture
deployment. Communication Manager is an open, extensible IP telephony platform that
provides 700+ PBX features, high reliability and scalability, and advanced features for
productivity and mobility. Avaya Aura Communication Manager Messaging resides on
the same server as Communications Manager to support integrated voice mail.
Avaya Aura Messaging supports users with a rich set of features that increase their
reachability, adds new types of message notification options, and provides more ways
to access and receive messagesall controlled using an intuitive web portal.
Session Manager supports SIP and enables multi-vendor integration, centralized dial
plans and user profiles, centralized SIP trunking, on-net call routing, and enhanced
scalability and security. System Manager is a common management platform that helps
to reduce system management complexity. It also provides centralized management
functions for provisioning and administration.
Avaya Aura Presence Services provides a scalable, high-performance presence
aggregation service that collects and disseminates rich presence information between
Avaya and other third-party endpoints. Presence support enables users to locate
colleagues and experts to address customer inquiries, or solve a critical problem in real
time.
Avaya Aura System Platform technology enables simplified deployment of Avaya's
products and solutions; it provides a common framework for Avaya Aura that leverages
virtualization technology, pre-defined templates, common installation, licensing and
support infrastructure to deliver and deploy Avaya's applications effectively.
The Avaya Session Border Controller for Enterprise provides industry-leading
enterprise security for unified communication solutions, and connectivity over any
network to any smart phone or alternative devices.
Avaya Aura Application Enablement Services are a set of enhanced telephony APIs,
protocols, and web services that are available to developers. These capabilities support
2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

This diagram of Avaya Aura illustrates that Avaya Aura is a three tier IMS-type of
architecture. With Avaya Aura, there is an Applications tier, a Connections tier, and an
Access tier. Sometimes these tiers are referred to as layers within a technical
architecture design.
IMS is shorthand for IP Multimedia Subsystem, which is an open standard, three-tier
next-generation networking architecture that was developed for third-generation and
beyond wireless, data, and telecommunications networking convergence.
IMS was originally designed for service providers and carriers looking for an open,
standards-based architecture that would help them lower costs, provide them with a
faster time to market for new services, support multivendor interoperability with
standardized third party interfacing, enable them to provide innovative multimedia
services, and provide a central repository for business data. This architecture design
also supports carrier-grade resiliency and advanced security capabilities. Avaya is
unique in delivering an enterprise-class variation of this type of architecture specifically
for our business and enterprise customers.
Using a derivative IMS-type architecture design enables Avaya Aura to provide a highly
available and flexible architecture that supports future-proofing for our customers and
their specific UC applications. This inherently robust design also can help our
customers to optimize resiliency and security for todays enterprise that is currently
using or will be using multimedia for collaboration. This includes audio or
videoconferencing, video on demand for training, multimedia contact center
applications, or rich media IP applications such as AvayaLiveTM Engage.
The Avaya Aura architecture provides inherently advanced support and functional
advantages for today's mobile enterprise over Avaya's competition. This
comprehensive architecture foundation and optimization support not only integrates
with innovative Avaya solutions, but also with our customers third-party and legacynetwork components and applications.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

The Avaya Aura architecture establishes a mediation point where disparate

applications, systems and locations can be connected or linked, thus reducing
complexity and bringing collaboration and Unified Communication applications as
needed to all required users.
In doing so, network and access costs are reduced, legacy infrastructure
investments are protected and new types of applications can be rapidly developed
and deployed.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Avaya Aura is key to enabling our customers to deploy the optimized business
communications, collaboration, video and mobility solutions that are clearly part of a
significant enterprise communications market trend.
In today's business environment, Avaya sales teams will discover that many business
problems that their enterprise customers face can be solved with Avaya Aura Suite
Licensing that includes our Foundation Suite, the Mobility Suite and the Collaboration
Suite.
The Foundation Suite is SIP-enabled and is comprised of core telephony, messaging,
and desktop clients with UC phone support. The Mobility Suite includes all of the
Foundation Suite capabilities and is also designed to empower roaming users, road
warriors and telecommuters with Unified Messaging, mobile clients, and secure Bring
Your Own Device or BYOD access. The Collaboration Suite includes both the
Foundation Suite and Mobility Suite and supports power collaborators with video and
multi-modal conferencing.
The core enabling foundation architecture for the Avaya Suite Licensing is Avaya
Aura; this means that sales teams will often find themselves in sales discussions
about how Avaya Aura Suite Licensing aligns to specific customer needs for deploying
the most cost effective and viable mobility and /or collaboration tools, and that Avaya
Aura can be positioned as a key selling differentiator in our sales efforts.
So sales teams should lead their customers to understand that Avaya Aura is a
powerful foundation and optimizing architecture that will help them solve their
business challenges while providing them with inherent long term value that address
today's critical business imperatives. Sales teams should also discuss how Avaya
Aura can set a business up for future business growth that can be achieved through
productivity enhancements and enabled through efficient workforce collaboration.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Now lets begin with key sales positioning and messaging information that you can
use in your sales discussions. Specifically, we are going to provide you with an
overview of the purpose and key capabilities of Avaya Aura that you should use in
your customer opportunity interactions.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

10

As we have discussed previously, Avaya Aura is the communications architecture

and foundation for next generation, people-centric collaboration.
This means that Avaya Aura makes it possible to unify networks, devices, audio
plus video plus graphical media, business applications and SIP presence across a
common infrastructure thus allowing users, not technology, to define the
appropriate collaboration experience. In other words, we place users in control and
let them leverage the tools they need, when they need them and how they want to
use them. We do this by leveraging the power of our unique implementation of
Session Initiation Protocol or SIP to deploy, manage and access collaborative
applications transparently across infrastructure locations and with various devices.
The Avaya Aura architecture foundation can be described as being both
evolutionary and revolutionary. That is, because it allows our existing clients to
evolve to an advanced unified communications, or UC architecture, at a pace they
are comfortable with and Avaya Aura is also revolutionary because it is not just
another PBX-centric environment, but Avaya Aura creates a UC and even a
Contact Center foundation for the future that will support advanced people-centric
collaboration.
Using our SIP-based environment, Avaya Aura provides the basic UC
functionalities youd expect including call processing, messaging, networking and
routing, and system management. But this architecture also provides other
advanced, innovative UC functions that are not as common, such as advanced
presence services, transparent and secure external access, and interoperability
with third-party hardware and applications.




2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

11

There are many capablities associated with Avaya Aura; here we have highlighted five
key areas you will want to position in your sales discussions. Avaya Aura is an extremely
flexible, open standards-based based architecture and provides a more adaptable
foundation environment than our competitors can actually claim. This means that Avaya
Aura can more easly integrate not only Avaya applications, devices and infrastructure,
but it can also integrate well with many legacy components, third party products or
custom apps that our customers may require.
The next key feature area is scalability. Avaya offers a single-server Midsize Enterprise
version of Avaya Aura for smaller deployments and a multi-server version for larger
deployments. We offer cost-effective configurations that can scale from 250 users up to
250,000 users.
Another important feature is our three tier IP Media Subsystem or IMS-type architecture.
Advantages of this type of architecture include lower operating and capital costs, faster
deployment of custom applications, and support for multiple vendors using open
standards such as SIP. This architecture design is unique in our industry and is a
significant differentiator from other architectural designs such as the semi-closed and less
flexible UC architectures that our competition offers.
Another feature that makes this architecture revolutionary is its ability to integrate
solutions from multiple vendors. This includes other vendors hardware and third-party
applications. What makes this level of integration possible is our support of the open SIP
standard, plus our ability to offer specialized hardware and software or middleware to
front-end existing non-SIP hardware.
Although there are many other features of Avaya Aura, the last one we are going to
highlight here is reliability and security. Using Geo-redundant duplicate servers, and
backup systems in the core and at remote gate ways, we can achieve reliability even
greater than 99.999%, or better than five nines reliability. For security, in addition to the
2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

12

Here we will overview the Aura Aura components both in the context of the
architecture tiers and around the key individual components.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

13

Unified communications and collaboration applications are included in the Avaya

Aura Applications tier.
All applications must use SIP to communicate with Session Manager and the core
communications services are provided by the components of the Connection tier.
It is important for both you and your customers to understand that while Aura utilizes
SIP communications, legacy devices such as digital phones and H.323 devices are
supported and optimized by the Aura infrastructure.
That is, Avaya provides a front-ending solution to integrate these types of devices, so
our customers can take advantage of UC applications deployed for user access, while
protecting their current device investments.
This also means that the Avaya Aura architecture design enables a customer to
migrate fully to SIP over the time period that makes sense for their business budgets
and planning efforts.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

14

The Connections tier of Avaya Aura connects applications with the collaboration
clients and devices in the Access tier. The Connections tier provides functions such
as user authentication and routing of applications to users.
That is, users connected at the Access tier can request a communication service or
function, and the Connections tier services or processes can determine the
applications required for that function and subsequently route that request to
specific applications.
As an example, the simple function of checking voice mail requires support from
both the call processing application, such as from Avaya Aura Communication
Manager, and the messaging application, such as Avaya Aura Messaging which are
connected via the Connection tier.
This tier also provides connectivity to external networks and cloud solutions, such
as the Internet and for connections to communication service providers. Access
connections can be made through an Avaya Session Border Controller for
Enterprise or SBCE for security reasons.
Components in this layer also include Session Manager, an appropriate Session
Border Controller like the SBCE, and Avaya Aura Presence Services which helps to
identify important user connection information and appropriate applications.
System Manager provides centralized management and services for the
applications software as well as for specific components and devices in each of the
three tiers of the Avaya Aura architecture.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

15

The Access tier includes all of the endpoints such as phones, clients such as one-X
Communicator and Scopia video endpoints, devices, servers, gateways, and
third-party PBXs that need to utilize requested and authorized applications.
All of these components must also communicate in the Avaya Aura architecture by
way of SIP, but using our innovative and comprehensive solution design, legacy
devices that use protocols other than SIP can fully function across the Aura SIP
environment using a protocol translation process.
That is, while access devices must connect with Session Manager via SIP, you can
still have a digital phone connected to an existing third-party PBX or with
Communication Manager, and then be connected to Session Manager with
functionality translation to SIP.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

16

These are multiple deployment choices for Avaya Aura.

Avaya Aura can be deployed as separate applications on individual servers or as a
multi-server solution, or as applications installed on a single virtualized server for the
Midsize Enterprise, or as virtualized software applications called the Avaya Aura
Virtualized Environment or VE that will work with a customer provided server certified
as VMware compliant. There is also an optimized turnkey solution that is called
Collaboration Pod for Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment.
The virtualized choices utilize VMware which is a virtualization platform that
integrates Avaya Aura applications and management tools. Virtualization can also be
used to expand the applications environment and scale Avaya Aura for specific
business requirements.

17

The Avaya portfolio of unified communications applications that are optimized in the
Avaya Aura architecture is extensive, powerful and innovative.
The Avaya Agile Communications Environment provides interfaces that enable business
application developers to invoke multi-vendor communication functions from their own
business applications without having to deal with the complexities of the underlying
network infrastructures.
Avaya Client Applications are a set of plug-ins that allow desktop applications, including
Microsoft Lync, Office, IE and Dynamics CRM, as well as IBM Sametime and
Salesforce.com to integrate and connect with Avaya Aura systems.
Scopia Video Conferencing is a comprehensive video solution portfolio that works with
Avaya Aura solutions. With Scopia video solutions you can create conference rooms
without walls and connect from anywhere to create a virtual conference room and then
invite other desktop or mobile users and room setups to conference meetings.
Avaya Aura Conferencing provides integrated audio, video, and web collaboration
capabilities and runs on Avaya Aura via our SIP-based, open communications platform.
The Avaya Flare Experience is an easy-to-use interface with one-click access to realtime, enterprise-wide audio, video, and web collaboration. Flare is available for a wide
variety of mobile devices and computer operating systems.
Accessible from any Internet connection and web browser, AvayaLiveTM Engage
supports one-on-one conversations or group brainstorming sessions and any
collaborative-style meeting with rich video and interactive innovation.
DevConnect Applications include ready-made, Avaya Aura interoperability-proven
solutions to enhance business productivity that have been developed by Avaya partners.


2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

18

Lets recap and summarize the key points we have discussed here and point you to
additional reference and resource information.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

19

Avaya Aura is the next generation communications solution and architecture that
supports people-centric collaboration.
Avaya Aura is a highly scalable, resilient and an open architecture that provides the
optimal foundation for cost-effective and compelling unified communication solutions.
Avaya sales teams will discover that many business problems that their enterprise
customers face, can be solved with Avaya Aura Suite Licensing solutions that include
our Foundation Suite, the Mobility Suite and Collaboration Suite solution packages and
that these solutions include the Avaya Aura architecture. Customer business executives
will find significant benefits with the collaboration solutions that we offer that are
optimized and enabled by Avaya Aura.
Each of the Avaya Aura architecture components has a specific purpose and provides
highly robust, secure and powerful capabilities that can be positioned by Avaya sales
teams to answer our customers unique business challenges.
The three-tier IMS type Avaya Aura architecture provides our customers with
comprehensive capabilities and design flexibility that is a unique sales differentiator.
Indeed, Avaya Aura provides many unique sales advantages vs. our competition and
Avaya Aura supports todays business communication trends including for mobility,
multimedia, and collaboration application support.
Avaya provides choices for Avaya Aura deployment including a comprehensive multiple
server appliance set, an innovative and cost effective solution for mid-size enterprises,
and virtualized solution choices enabled using VMware.
Finally, we examined several key Avaya unified communication applications that are
supported and optimized by Avaya Aura deployments.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

20

Since web links change, we have provided the general information about where to
find additional resource information. Avaya portals are updated often and enable
associates and partners to use sidebar navigation or search functions to find
specific and updated product information as needed.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

21

Thank you for your attention to this course information; when you are able, move
forward to the next course in this series.

2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

22