A People-First Approach to Business Collaboration
Jeff Holton, Vice President of Technology
Phil Edholm, Avaya’s vice president of technology strategy and innovation, recently gave a keynote address at SKC’s annual Technology Summit in Kansas City. The summit brings together more than 25 manufacturers and 400 of SKC’s clients to learn about the latest Unified Communication and Collaboration technologies.
Phil’s keynote gave an interesting viewpoint on collaboration coming from a predominate voice provider in the UC space.
The idea of business collaboration being people-centric instead of device-centric was the main theme of Phil’s keynote address.
First, customers are demanding more ways to communicate with companies. Particularly in contact centers, there are exciting new capabilities that allow these customer service teams reach their customers in the way the customer prefers. Contact centers need to have the capabilities to connect with customers over a live phone call, IM, text, or social media. Avaya and SKC can help contact centers implement the technologies that allow this, while still keeping the workflow simple for the agent.
Secondly, Phil identified a new trend called “context-aware communications” – where software applications examine and react to a user’s changing context in order to help promote and mediate people’s interactions with each other and their environment.
“We need to remember context before, during and after a conversation,” said Edholm.
This technology can intelligently decide things such as:
People: who do you need to know?
Documents: which documents are most relevant to this conversation?
Conversations: which threads are most important?
Events: what’s next on the schedule?
It creates something called predictive PILLARS, inferred from communication activity, relationships and relevant databases.
Avaya’s flagship context-aware product is the Avaya Flare Experience, which is software for the desktop but can also be used in the form of a tablet. Avaya Flare eliminates the need to use different interfaces and different directories to communicate across various types of tools.
Although Avaya has historically been known for its VoIP and SIP voice solutions, it’s become a visionary in the future of complete unified communication solutions.
About Phil Edholm
Phil Edholm is the vice president of technology strategy and innovation for Avaya. He is responsible for defining the vision and strategic technology directions for Avaya GCS and the GCS portfolio architecture, strategy and design/user experience. He has extensive experience working for Nortel, Sytek/Hughes LAN systems, and Silicon Valley start-ups. He currently has ten granted patents with 12 patent applications pending.
Tags: Avaya, Communication Technology, Phil Edholm, Tech Summit
Posted in: General,Technology