Avaya Expands Video Offerings to Deliver Intelligent Huddle Room Experiences

Avaya Holdings Corp. (NYSE: AVYA), a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, today introduced a number of enhancements to its video offering that promise to transform the group meeting room experience as well as business video economics. Avaya has expanded its comprehensive video collaboration solutions portfolio with new offerings designed for today’s smaller meeting spaces–including new Avaya IX Huddle Cameras, which deliver high quality video at prices that match small meeting space budgets, and the Avaya IX Collaboration Unit, which is an open “all-in-one” next-generation collaboration solution. In addition, Avaya now makes it possible for businesses to move their group conferencing rooms into the cloud with a comprehensive monthly subscription model.

Avaya is uniquely addressing the growing business need to add collaboration technology to small meeting spaces, often called huddle rooms, by making the overall experience more intelligent. Frost and Sullivan estimates there are over 32 million of these huddle rooms in offices worldwide, of which a very small percentage are equipped with video collaboration technology. According to Frost and Sullivan, huddle room meetings will surge from 12 percent to 70 percent of all video conferencing by 2023.

In the past, these spaces have received little attention from business IT teams. However, with a continuing focus on team collaboration solutions, business dynamics changing to more frequent and smaller meetings across geographically distributed locations, and with the onset of more open-space plans, huddle room technology has now become a point of focus for businesses.

“Avaya is moving the huddle room experience beyond the status quo with customer-led solutions that seamlessly integrate with their existing UC and video infrastructures,” said Chris McGugan, Avaya SVP, Solutions & Technology. “Customers also want to use their favourite cloud-based collaboration applications and our next-generation open architecture enables this. The result is a much richer user experience, plug and play simplicity, and the ability to leverage existing investments. This approach combined with the flexibility of a subscription model will accelerate the extension of video collaboration to all areas of an organization and within business verticals.”

“VIDEOGECOM is very excited to be able to offer Avaya’s next generation huddle room solutions to our customers,” said Pierfrancesco Coluzzi, CEO of VIDEOGECOM. “In our experience, it is by far the easiest huddle room solution to set-up and use. It is a cloud-centric world and the Avaya IX Collaboration Unit takes full advantage of all the cloud has to offer for businesses.”

Avaya IX Huddle Cameras can be used with Avaya IX Room Video solutions or connected to a laptop to deliver High Definition (HD) video at price points that align with the needs of smaller meeting spaces. The HC020 and HC050 are easy to deploy and use, and both provide an exceptional video experience.

The Avaya IX Collaboration Unit is an all-in-one collaboration device that represents a breakthrough in performance and price. This unit does not require a laptop connection, meaning it delivers easy startup, reliability and consistently high quality every time. It sits on top of the video screen, has integrated microphones, and provides a wide field of view which is important for huddle spaces that are typically not very deep but can be very wide. It also offers wireless content sharing from mobile smart devices. This next-generation huddle room solution provides UC platform integration, interoperability with standards-based video infrastructures, and enables users to run and share their cloud-based applications of choice. It is the first all-in-one device to bring everything the cloud has to offer to the huddle space in a way that makes sense for businesses of all sizes

The Avaya IX Workplace accelerates business by providing a single application that delivers calling, messaging, meetings and team collaboration–all with the same ease of use associated with personal applications. The Avaya IX Workplace can be delivered on premise or via private, public or hybrid cloud.

Monthly Subscription Model: Organizations currently expect to spend much less for huddle room technology than they would spend for a large corporate conference room setup. However, huddle room conferencing solutions can still be very costly. And although businesses often subscribe to their web-based video meeting solutions on a monthly basis, their budgets are hit with the up-front costs of the meeting room devices.

Avaya has broken through this up-front cost barrier–allowing businesses to purchase all elements of their huddle room solutions–including the Avaya IX Workplace and the room devices–on a monthly basis. For about the same price that current providers are charging for only the cloud connection, businesses can have access to a complete huddle room solution from Avaya.