Avaya redesigns its Avaya Vantage desktop device to improve the home-office experience
Avaya announced a redesign of its Avaya Vantage desktop device to significantly improve the home-office experience. The reimagined Avaya Vantage is an all-in-one meeting solution for the home office which includes a built-in high definition conferencing camera, wide band audio and four microphones, enabling an exceptional collaboration experience without requiring the use of a laptop.
Avaya also announced that it has integrated the Avaya Vantage with its Avaya Spaces collaboration app. Avaya Spaces is the cloud-based team collaboration and meeting tool that is changing how work gets done, enabling the digital workplace by bringing together distributed groups of people instantly with immersive work spaces where they can message, meet, share content, manage tasks and collaborate in the cloud.
Avaya Spaces delivers immersive virtual communications and team collaboration to ensure everyone is connected and informed, with the best ideas being actioned, regardless of location. Its capabilities — including chat, audio and video conferencing, file sharing, task management, and more — enables hyper-fast decision making – and breaks down barriers to immediately process change across teams and departments. It provides a 24×7 follow-the-sun work platform where globally distributed teams collaborate as if they were in the same room.
The Avaya Vantage and Avaya Spaces are central to Avaya’s Composable Home Office Solutions strategy – which is driven by the Avaya OneCloud framework and leverages the capabilities of Avaya OneCloud UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS. This new approach empowers businesses with the capability to compose personalized home office experiences for their employees and customer service agents.
“Avaya Vantage and Avaya Spaces are examples of the powerful building blocks available for our customers to compose solutions to increase the productivity of home office workers,” said Simon Harrison, Avaya SVP and CMO.
“Avaya OneCloud is accelerating digital transformation for our customers by delivering packaged business capabilities and connecting them with everything the cloud has to offer.”
Avaya’s recent “Work From Anywhere” survey reveals that 65 percent of companies polled are adding new video conferencing solutions as they adapt their workforce to what is likely to be a long-term trend toward more home offices.
Analysts estimate that there are now over 1 billion knowledge workers globally, and before the pandemic the percentage of these who worked remotely was in the low single digits. New estimates indicate that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the workforce will work from home at least a couple of times a week.
With this shift to a remote workforce, the laptop has become the new “office” – being used for calling, meetings, messaging – as well as for completing work projects. As a result, laptops have become crowded with numerous CPU-intensive apps, and work must often be paused to use the softphone or to participate in meetings.
The newly redesigned Avaya Vantage is a breakthrough solution that elevates today’s home office experience by offloading calling and meetings from the laptop onto a purpose-built device.
Avaya also announced that it has included new “screen shifting” technology in the Avaya Vantage to enable new flexibility when participating in a meeting. Content, meeting participants, or both can be shifted to a larger screen based on the meeting dynamics at any given time. And for presenting content, one touch on the Avaya Vantage opens the same meeting on a laptop to enable the presentation.
“The new Avaya Vantage is three times more powerful than the previous version — and delivers the versatility and simplicity required for work at home communications,” said Anthony Bartolo, Avaya EVP and Chief Product Officer.
“This new Avaya innovation-at-the-edge enables employees to orchestrate their home office meetings experience in a way that works best for them.”
WiFi support means that the Avaya Vantage can be put anywhere, and it has complete connectivity to most any headset, keyboard / mouse, external camera, and an external display.
It provides the ultimate in simplicity of setup and use, integrates with existing Avaya OneCloud platforms as well as standards-based video infrastructure, and allows access and use of the cloud-based applications of choice.
The Avaya Vantage is available with Avaya’s Device as a Service (DaaS) offering which means it can be provided to home office workers for a small monthly fee.