Smart Solutions for Digital India
Avaya Techathon 2015 focused on technologies for ‘smart everything’ – cities, enterprises, banking, healthcare and education.
This October, at its annual two-city road show - Techathon, Avaya, a global leader in business communications software, systems and services, showcased its latest solutions for realizing Digital India, the government initiative to connect the country, including its villages, via a broadband network for digital delivery of services.
At the demo, there were solutions to help government, citizens, businesses, banks, healthcare providers, and educational institutions accelerate their communication and collaboration by embedding “communication” in a wide variety of everyday devices while enhancing the security around them. These offerings come with blended capabilities like IoT, video, mobility, wireless, data analytics.
Avaya’s latest networking, collaboration and communication solutions for both mid-market organizations and large enterprises took the spotlight. “Digital India represents a huge opportunity for us. It encouraged us to put on our thinking caps and come up with solutions that prove compelling in the Indian context. Already our R&D team in Bengaluru has built a networking technology that is considered fairly ahead of the market. It is serving as a smart foundation for executing on the Digital India and Make in India vision,” said Satish Murthy, Senior Director and Bengaluru Site Leader at Avaya.
On the smart city front, Avaya’s R&D has given rise to a smart foundation for India’s urbanscapes of the future, which will include sensors that take care of the surveillance of traffic violations, crime, and the like. In smart banking, the Avaya solution lets the customer connect across multiple channels (e.g., call center, self-service, etc.) and switch between channels, providing a more authentic omnichannel experience.
This makes it easy for the bank’s agents to handle the increase in customer numbers, reduce the number of dropped calls, in turn leading to fewer customer complaints. As hospitals move to electronic medical records from paper ones, there is significant pressure on the network. By providing multiple links to all parts of a network, the smart healthcare solution keeps a hospital’s information network up and running, no matter if an individual connection fails. Aided by highspeed networks, medical staff can access patient records and medical images any time of the day or night.
Video-enabled communication has good scope in smart education. These can help, say, a coaching institution, deliver classes to students in far-flung areas.
India is at the heart of Avaya’s innovation focus and Techathon essentially extends the fruits of this R&D to Indian businesses, in particular. More than 35% of the company’s product and solution development comes out of India. The company’s largest development operations spread across Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad in India. Avaya’s India R&D centers comprise more than 2,200 engineers, researchers and product management staff and boast state-of-the-art research and engineering labs.
“Leveraging open, flexible and mobile technologies, today it’s possible to embed communication into any application. But the era we are entering is one of communication-enabling everything, so to speak, which will cut latency in a major way. Companies like Avaya are well-placed to lead this change,” says Vijay Mhaskar, Senior Director and Pune Site Leader at Avaya.