Avaya revamps Vantage all-in-one meeting solution

Avaya has redesigned the Vantage desktop device, an all-in-one meeting solution for the home office which includes a built-in high-definition conferencing camera, wideband audio and four microphones, enabling collaboration without requiring the use of a laptop.

Avaya also announced that it has integrated the Avaya Vantage with its Avaya Spaces collaboration app, a cloud-based team collaboration and meeting tool that brings together distributed groups of people with workspaces where they can message, meet, share content, manage tasks and collaborate in the cloud.

Its capabilities – including chat, audio and video conferencing, file sharing, task management, and more – break down barriers to process change across teams and departments.

It provides a 24/7 work platform where globally distributed teams collaborate as if they were in the same room.

Vantage and 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 personalised home office experiences for their employees and customer service agents.

Avaya's recent "Work From Anywhere" survey revealed that 65% 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 those who worked remotely was in the low single digits.

New estimates indicate that when the pandemic is over, 30% 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 offloads calling and meetings from the laptop onto a purpose-built device.

Additional processing power has been added – making it three times faster than the previous version, Wi-Fi support means that it can be put anywhere, and it has complete connectivity to most any headset, keyboard/mouse, external camera, and an external display.

It 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.

New "screen shifting" technology is included in the 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.