Avaya Engagement Development
Platform Fulfills on the Vision for
Communications-Enabled Business
Applications
December 2014
Prepared by:
Zeus Kerravala
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the
Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
by Zeus Kerravala
December 2014
ZK Research
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A Division of Kerravala
Consulting
Introduction: New Business Trends Drive Unified
Communications Evolution
Legacy unified communications (UC) tools were developed in an era when
workers were primarily deskbound and collaborated mostly with internal
employees. Because of this, communications and collaboration tools existed as
standalone applications. Workers used business applications to conduct day-today work, and then UC tools were used for collaborating with other workers.
Although this process wasn’t optimal, businesses were able to build effective
workflows around the different applications and UC tools.
However, the nature of work has changed. Competitive advantage is no longer
about a business having a single core competency. Today, competitive
advantage is based on making quick decisions while involving the best people
both inside and outside the organization. Also, technology trends such as
mobility, social networks and cloud computing have created a highly connected
world where people can access a wealth of information instantly. But for many
businesses, a key challenge has arisen: How can employees have real-time
access to the information they need to perform their jobs faster? This includes
the ability to make quick decisions but also be able to respond to co-workers,
customers, business partners and other members of the extended enterprise at
the speed the business dictates (Exhibit 1).
zeus@zkresearch.com
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In reality, bringing communications and applications together isn’t a new concept.
A handful of leading organizations have already created communicationsenabled business applications (CEBA) that integrate UC tools and information.
The evolving business climate has made CEBA a top priority for all IT and
business leaders. The following are the key drivers for CEBA today:
 Improving customer satisfaction and advocacy: The battle for the
customer has never been tougher. Businesses of all kinds are looking to
secure the loyalties of profitable, savvy customers. They can do this by rolling
out communications-enabled applications that deliver highly personalized
experiences.
 Increasing worker agility and effectiveness: Workers need faster access to
enable them to respond, collaborate and continually learn on the job.
Communications-enabled business processes can effectively eliminate all of
the human latency involved in processes today.
 Improving profitability: Every organization strives to maximize profitability,
and many try to do so by cutting costs. However, CEBA can lead to
differentiated services that drive additional revenues and repeat business.
Also, profitability can be increased through a more efficient workforce that can
make decisions faster with fewer people involved.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
Influence and insight
through social media
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Exhibit 1: The Diverse Communication Needs of the Extended Enterprise
Source: ZK Research 2014 Unified Communications Purchasing Study
Any organization that wishes to maximize worker
productivity, improve customer service and leverage
the power of social and mobile communications
should now make communications-enabled
applications a top priority. However, legacy UC
platforms are not well suited to making the process
of developing communications-enabled business
applications fast and simple. It’s time for UC
platforms to evolve to meet today’s business
challenges.
Section II: The Challenges with Legacy
Unified Communications Platforms
The value proposition of UC is multifaceted. Most
organizations look to UC to reduce the cost of
collaboration and communication costs (Exhibit 2).
However, IT leaders recently have been using UC to
improve customer service, enhance mobile
collaboration and create a competitive advantage.
These benefits cannot be achieved if UC remains
isolated from other business applications. To combat
this, some developers and software vendors have
attempted to integrate UC capabilities into
applications. However, they’ve had limited success
for the following reasons:
 Legacy telephony knowledge is required. To
build communications-enabled applications, the
developer usually must have deep knowledge of
computer-telephony integration (CTI). Very few
developers understand modern programming
languages and have programming knowledge of
legacy telephony environments.
 The lines between the contact center and
unified communications are blurring. Almost
every employee plays a role in customer
engagement. This has blurred the lines between
contact center tools and unified communications
as the information between customer service
agents and other employees must be consistent
and shared. Consequently, the complexity in
building communications-enabled applications
has increased.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
3
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Exhibit 2: The Value Proposition of UC Is Multi-Dimensional
Source: ZK Research 2014 UC Deployment Survey
 The developer environment is fragmented.
Because UC has evolved through the integration
of several discrete technologies, developer tools
for UC tend to be fragmented. A developer
looking to build a UC-enabled application would
have to work with a number of loosely coupled
tools such as web services, mobile SDKs and
contact center SDKs (Exhibit 3). This makes
integrating UC and business applications
extremely difficult.
 Data overload is prevalent. Businesses are
capturing more and more data from an increasing
number of sources including traditional business
applications as well as social media, mobile
information and collaborative applications.
However, many organizations lack the ability to
convert the data into something that’s actionable
by the business.
 UC platforms were built for traditional
computing devices. The majority of UC
development platforms were built in an era when
desktop computing was the norm. The ZK
Research 2014 Enterprise Mobility Survey
revealed that almost 90% of knowledge workers
carry a smartphone or tablet, and many carry
both today. UC platforms must evolve to enable
workers to take full advantage of smartphones
and tablets.
 UC platforms are not aligned with current
business trends. UC development platforms
need to marry social media and mobility with
customer engagement. This will help
organizations respond to customers faster and
more accurately.
 Development cycles are long and costly.
Because of the fragmented tool kits and the need
to understand CTI, organizations would need
large developer teams to build even simple
applications. This fragmented approach would
lead to application development times of several
months, which could cause organizations to miss
or be late to benefit from key market
opportunities.
Although the value proposition of communicationsenabled applications is well understood, the efforts
required by developers are far too great for
businesses to capitalize on the opportunities. What’s
required today is a developer environment that is
aligned with today’s market.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
4
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Exhibit 3: UC Development Is Composed of Fragmented Tools
Source: ZK Research 2014 Unified Communications Purchasing Study
Section III: Avaya Engagement
Development Platform Advances
Communications Enablement
The Avaya Engagement Development Platform
(EDP) was created to address the specific problems
involved in developing communications-enabled
business applications. It is integrated into the Avaya
Aura Platform and shifts it from a UC suite to an
applications development environment in which
organizations have the ability to create
communications-rich business applications. Avaya
EDP can enhance the responsiveness and efficiency
of employees while building on existing investments.
Avaya EDP is a development platform that brings
together the customer experience management
found in call centers and the UC tools used by
knowledge workers to create enterprise-wide
solutions. The platform easily integrates
communications technologies into any business
application or sequence of applications, making it
quick and easy to develop and deploy vertical
applications.
Avaya EDP is a true breakthrough in UC application
development because of the following attributes:
 Uses modern programming languages: Avaya
EDP is aligned with programming environments
that social, mobile and cloud developers use
today, including JSON, XML and REST.
 No knowledge of CTI or telephony required:
Most cloud, mobile and social developers have
little to no knowledge of legacy communications.
Avaya EDP is designed to require no telephony
or CTI skills, but it still provides a rich set of
enterprise-grade communication capabilities.
 Cloud-ready: Avaya EDP is completely
virtualized, meaning developers and ISVs can
build applications ready for the cloud.
 Multichannel capabilities: Avaya EDP was
designed with full multimedia capabilities,
including traditional voice, mobile, email, SMS
and video functionality.
 Single developer interface: The Avaya EDP
Software Developers Kit provides a single
interface into all of the Avaya Aura capabilities
and has a complete range of modalities and
applications.
Exhibit 4 illustrates how Avaya EDP functions.
Inputs are generated from any interaction through
any medium including voice, web, mobile devices,
social media, video and email. Avaya EDP
interfaces with the Avaya Aura Platform and its
applications, manipulating the inputs in a way that
improves the flow of information.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
5
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Exhibit 4: Avaya Engagement Development Platform
Source: Avaya and ZK Research, 2014
For example, with Avaya EDP, an event could be
intelligently routed to a specific area for response
such as an outbound multimodal broadcast to create
awareness. Regardless of the application created,
the results are improved customer satisfaction,
better use of employee time, and faster
responsiveness to issues and requests.
snap-ins, customer behaviors, preferences and
browser history can be captured and integrated into
a single experience that quickly gets customers and
agents into the right conversation to resolve issues
fast.
Recently, Avaya released its 3.0 version of the
Engagement Development Platform. The 3.0 release
added a set of “snap-in” modules to further simplify
the development process, speed up time to market
and make advanced capabilities accessible to every
application. Snap-ins can be thought of as modular,
re-usable code that connects or enables a specific
outcome. The Avaya EDP snap-ins can be used
across multiple applications either alone or in
conjunction with other snap-ins. The snap-ins
include the following.
This snap-in integrates real-time speech into
business and contact center applications and
workflows, which gives organizations the ability to
develop and deploy speech services across the
company. Through these services, developers can
manage and use speech technologies to create
interactive speech search applications.
Avaya WebRTC Snap-in
WebRTC gives any user using a PC, smartphone or
tablet “click to call” capabilities within a web browser.
When used in conjunction with other Avaya EDP
Avaya Real-Time Speech Snap-in
Avaya Context Store Snap-in
The Context Store simplifies the tracking, collection
and sharing of customer and business information
used to improve real-time collaboration and
customer engagement. This snap-in simplifies the
aggregation of information across various enterprise
and public sources, which ensures that workers can
make the best decisions in real time.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
6
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Avaya Work Assignment Snap-in
This snap-in is a work distribution system that
leverages real-time data to customize customer
engagements and optimize the use of business
resources. It gives businesses the ability to create
communications-enabled applications that can
respond and react in real time based on business
goals and desired outcomes. An example of this
could be applying rules to optimize sales
opportunities by routing high-value customers to an
organization’s best salespeople.
In addition to the snap-ins, version 3.0 includes the
Avaya Engagement Designer, which enables a user
to build applications without the need to write Java
code. Avaya Engagement Designer provides a wide
range of preconfigured capabilities that can be
mapped out so that non-developers can create
process flows and applications. This simplifies the
process of application development.
Also new in version 3.0 is the AvayaLive
Collaboratory, which helps facilitate rapid application
development. The Collaboratory is a virtual instance
of the entire Avaya Aura Platform including EDP
7
(Exhibit 5). It enables developers and customers to
try the application development process without
requiring up-front investments or upgrades.
Section IV: Avaya Engagement
Development Platform Case Studies
Case Study 1: Esna Accelerates Workflow
Creation
Esna has a goal of providing the best
communications solution with an unparalleled user
experience to help people maximize productivity and
get work done quickly. Founded in 1989, Esna’s
early success was based on software solutions that
included voicemail, chat, click-to-call, auto attendant
and message broadcasting.
Today, the company has a broad collaboration
framework that lives and breathes through workflows
built into applications such as email and CRM. One
of Esna’s challenges is that it requires a large
overhead to create the connections it needs when
developing workflows as the company talks to Avaya
servers through proxies.
Exhibit 5: AvayaLive Collaboratory in Action
Source: Avaya and ZK Research, 2014
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
Previously, Esna had to create redundant servers to
handle the proxy capabilities. There was an Esna
server talking to an Avaya server, so the developers
had to build everything twice—once for each server.
Avaya’s EDP takes care of all the communications
“plumbing” and allows Esna developers to focus on
application creation. This provides the benefit of
being much easier and more cost effective for
Esna’s customers—there’s no requirement to buy
multiple servers for different divisions because the
Avaya EDP acts like a communications bus.
ESNA is leveraging the Avaya Engagement
Designer. This module speeds up the collaboration
process. For example, if six individuals were tied to a
certain document, Avaya EDP can automatically
invite all the document owners to a video meeting.
Joining this meeting only requires one click by the
invitation recipients.
ESNA is also leveraging the WebRTC snap-in. This
snap-in enables Esna to initiate calls or videos
directly from the browser. This is important for SaaSbased applications such as SugarCRM and
Salesforce.com. Esna customers can now start with
small browser-based meetings and quickly extend
them to a larger group.
Case Study 2: Datapoint Creates GameChanging Applications
Datapoint is a European Avaya integration partner
that specializes in the contact center. The
company’s customer base consists of primarily large
enterprises with a multicountry footprint, and it
specializes in building unique features for its
customers that run on top of the Avaya contact
center software. Datapoint also excels in connecting
CRM applications to Avaya contact centers to create
another layer of application intelligence above the
basic contact center software.
Datapoint also prides itself on having very
sophisticated developers. Instead of having an army
of hundreds of developers, the company only has
20. Therefore, its technology partners must provide
platforms that can maximize the productivity of this
small group of developers.
Historically, Datapoint found the communications
between Avaya products to be good but very limited.
For example, CTI integration was possible, but web
integration was not possible. And with the world
moving to the web, this was proving to be a limiting
factor.
“With other platforms, the cost to
build is low but usage costs can be
very high. With the Avaya
Engagement Development Platform,
the cost to build is also very low but
the cost to run is also very low since
the environment is well integrated.
Also, Avaya is the only development
partner that gives us the capability of
creating pure browser-based
collaborative applications.”
– Davide Petramala, Executive Vice
President of Business Development
and Sales, Esna
The 3.0 release of Avaya EDP has removed the
limitations of the older development platform.
Datapoint is currently building a communicationsenabled application for one of its customers: a large,
global insurance company. The advanced
application has the capability to understand what
topics customers have been looking for on the web
when they call in. Now, when a customer phones the
insurance company, the agent knows who is calling
and why the person is calling, and the agent can
quickly offer help. Datapoint has created a “game
changing” application that moves its customer from
being reactive to being proactive through a new
predicative model. Historically, customers would call
in and the agents would need to ask a series of
questions to gather the required information. Now,
most of the information is gathered automatically.
Datapoint was able to build this application because
all of the information is available in the Context Store
snap-in. The snap-in is effectively a huge database
to store all telephony, mobile and web events.
The snap-in model gives Datapoint more flexibility
and more time to be creative. The company can now
go to any of its customers and give them exactly
what they are asking for quickly. The combination of
the snap-ins enables Datapoint to connect the right
people to the right information or customers in real
time.
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
8
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
“The Avaya Engagement
Development Platform allows us to
differentiate ourselves from other
Avaya dealers as well as other contact
center vendors. We can now go to
customers with a highly consultative
approach with no limitation on
creativity. We are now competing on
new ideas rather than on price.”
– Arnaud Pigueller, Country Manager
for France, Datapoint
Plantronics also provides a number of contact center
APIs such as:
 Quick disconnect make or break indicates
whether the agent is available at his or her desk.
 Mute status indication helps the agent reporting
system know the agent has put a caller on mute.
 Future features include audio quality alerting,
asset tracking and acoustic event logging.
The partnership between Plantronics and Avaya
shows the power of Avaya EDP and its ecosystem.
The integration enables Avaya developer partners or
customers to choose the elements of the Plantronics
APIs they need, develop a solution and then
continually reuse it.
Case Study 4: WEBTEXT Brings Mobility to
Developers
Case Study 3: Plantronics Demonstrates
Ecosystem Strength
Plantronics has focused on building lightweight,
high-quality audio headsets since it was founded in
1961. Since then, Plantronics has continued to build
innovative products that improve the audio
experience through noise reduction, call clarity and
unique ergonomics.
As part of its overall vision of building a unified
experience, Plantronics is continually improving
users’ experience as they move between mobile
devices and desktop phones. Ultimately, it would like
to enable bidirectional movement of calls, but it
chose to start with mobile-to-desktop call movement.
Avaya and Plantronics have worked together to
make Plantronics headset APIs available through
Avaya snap-ins. Plantronics collects a wealth of
contextual information about users of its technology
to make UC applications smarter. This includes the
following:
 The Don/Doff wearing state indicates whether a
headset is being worn or not. It can be used to
route audio or help increase presence
robustness.
 Proximity indicates a near or far event to connect
devices such as a mobile device or PC. This is
how seamless transfer can be enabled.
 Mobile caller ID provides information to a PC or
an ecosystem.
 A head gesturing feature to indicate movement or
direction facing is forthcoming.
WEBTEXT is an Avaya DevConnect technology
partner that has won a number of innovation awards.
The company is the only development partner to win
two innovation awards in back-to-back years.
WEBTEXT developed a two-way SMS snap-in for
the Avaya Engagement Development Platform. The
snap-in is a cloud service that enables IVRs to
detect whether a person is calling from a cell phone.
The IVR offers the caller the choice of being put on
hold or communicating via SMS. If the caller
chooses SMS, a welcome message is sent. When
the caller posts a response, the text goes into the
webchat for the agent. The agent sees the
communications as a chat, but the caller continues
to see it as SMS communications. Now, the contact
center agent can handle five to 10 calls at a time
“There are different approaches to UC
development that the various vendors
take. The Avaya Engagement
Development Platform enables
anyone to use whatever pieces they
require to build an application. The
program expands on the creativity of
developers.”
– Christopher Brady, Senior Director,
Strategic Partnerships, Plantronics
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
9
Avaya Engagement Development Platform Fulfills on the Vision for Communications-Enabled Business Applications
instead of one or two, which significantly increases
the effectiveness of the agents.
WEBTEXT chose to develop the two-way SMS
snap-in for two reasons. The first is that it decreases
the amount of effort required to integrate WEBTEXT
into Avaya applications. Before EDP, a developer
needed to understand all of the unique APIs within
each Avaya product. Now, developers can write
once and let EDP act as a translator for the different
Avaya systems and third-party members of the
Avaya ecosystem.
The second reason is to make WEBTEXT services
available to the entire Avaya development
community. The EDP marketplace has effectively
become an incubator for innovation, and it provides
great value to companies such as WEBTEXT by
enabling it to combine its services with Avaya’s
capabilities and those of other third-party providers.
WEBTEXT is a cloud services company, and it has a
limited number of developers and engineers. The
company leveraged Avaya’s Collaboratory following
the development of the snap-in. Instead of having to
buy a significant amount of hardware and software
to get the products up and running, everything was
done online. It took only two weeks for two
WEBTEXT developers to create and test the
application. With traditional development methods, it
would have taken at least three to four weeks to get
the hardware installed and another three to four
months before anything would have been up and
running.
Section IV: Conclusion and
Recommendations
Mobility, social media and the cloud are changing
the way people work and the way businesses
compete. Enabling collaboration among the
extended enterprise so that businesses can make
decisions rapidly is now the basis of competitive
advantage. IT leaders must create unique customer
experiences that differentiate themselves from the
competition in order to dominate their markets. For
this to happen, business applications, contact
centers and communications technology must come
together. These areas of IT have lived in silos for
decades, making it almost impossible to create true
communications-enabled applications. To raise
productivity and lower costs, IT leaders must make
communications enablement of business
applications a priority. To help them get started, ZK
Research recommends the following:
10
“The value of Avaya Engagement
Development Platform to developers
is clear. Developer partners, like us,
can write one set of code and not
worry about integration of the backend systems. Also, through the
marketplace, others can use our
services to innovate in ways that are
beyond our resource limit. Avaya
Engagement Development Platform is
a force multiplier for WEBTEXT.”
– AJ Cahill, CEO and Co-Founder,
WEBTEXT
 Make communications-enabled applications a
top priority. Integrating communications with
business applications was a difficult, timeconsuming and expensive process. Development
platforms such as the Avaya Engagement
Development Platform can remove many barriers
to building these types of applications and allow
application developers to focus on the user
experience instead of technical integration
challenges.
 Developers should embrace the concept of
snap-ins. With the brisk pace of business today,
developers can no longer afford to spend time
writing the same code over and over. Snap-ins
enable the re-usability of modular software that
can be leveraged in a number of applications.
This concept is standard in business applications
but is new to the communications world.
 Make multi-modality the norm. The rise of
mobile platforms and social media has eradicated
single-mode communications. Developers should
focus on solutions that incorporate voice, video,
email, messaging and other forms of
communications. Multi-modality can fully uncap
the potential of social and mobile
communications.
© 2014 ZK Research: A Division of Kerravala Consulting
All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without the express prior permission of ZK Research is expressly prohibited.
For questions, comments or further information, e-mail zeus@zkresearch.com.