Enterprise communications vendor Avaya has been talking up the idea of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) for years now, but with its announcement of Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) at VoiceCon on Monday, the company took a big step toward moving CEBP from abstraction to reality. ANS makes communication (primarily voice communication, but also e-mail) an integral part of the response to business events by leveraging the Avaya Aura application distribution platform to contact the necessary parties and bring them together to properly respond to an event.
Avaya breaks the handling of business events into three components: Notification, response, and collaboration. ANS can automate certain aspects of these components to facilitate quicker and more effective solutions. If a certain trigger event occurs -- anything from a server room flooding to a retailer getting low on stock of a hot-selling item -- ANS will notify the necessary individuals and can bring them together on a conference call to start working on the solution. By operating via Aura, ANS avoids device compatibility issues; no matter if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Palm handheld, you will receive a notification as long as you're on the Aura network.
[ Earlier this year, Avaya announced its Aura Session Manager for unified communications. ]
ANS also provides for easy customization based on your business needs. There are some basic preconfigurations -- manufacturing, retail, etc. -- but users can configure ANS to address their particular problems without having to get into coding thanks to Avaya's modular approach to ANS. You start with a basic framework of problems to address, then tailor it to your needs, determine who needs to be notified of what issues, and set a communication preference hierarchy (i.e. ANS will attempt to reach a particular user by voice first, for example, but if the attempt is unsuccessful, it will move on to the next preferred mode).
Communication breakdowns can be business process killers, particularly if communication breaks down when rapid response is needed. Avaya claims that by bringing automated voice notification into emergency response, ANS can help you maintain business continuity no matter where your key responders are.
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