Avaya extends mobile IP client to 500 new devices

IP telephony specialist Avaya will shortly launch an IP telephony client for all Symbian-based Smartphones, with Windows Mobile and RIM Blackberry versions to follow at a later stage.

Currently, Avaya’s One-X Mobile Edition is available only for Nokia S60 and S80 smartphones, but in March or April this year support will be extended to cover around 500 other Symbian devices.

One-X Mobile will provide roaming workers a subset of the advanced voice over IP (VoIP) features, currently available on desktop IP phones, based on the session initiation protocol (SIP). It also delivers back-end integration with Avaya’s Communication Manager IP private branch exchange (PBX) solution.

Speaking at today’s NetEvents conference in Geneva, Chris Barrow, Avaya’s senior manager of analyst relationships, said that interoperability with third party IP PBX solutions would be added at a later stage.

“Available [IP telephony] features will be as consistent as we can get them, given the limitations of the hardware, because a lot depends on the user interface. We could chuck several hundred features at it, but we want to keep it simple,” Barrow said.

The company plans to introduce a software development kit (SDK) that allows developers to add automated communications features to standard applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or supply chain management (SCM) applications.

Dubbed Avaya Communications Enabled Business Process (CEPB), the middleware is designed to speed up communication between colleagues and business partners. It will provide presence-aware features that notify other users about calls or conferences, or send content, messages and task lists at the click of a mouse button, and enable automatic responses using interactive voice recognition (IVR), said Barrow.

“It is basically anything you can do with web services using Soap and XML, and can be fully integrated into any SOA,” Barrow explained.

The SDK is likely to be supplied through system integrators as a professional service rather than sold or given away directly to developers.