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OctelWarrior · June 2nd, 2005, 01:12 PM

Well, as you know the ever-awesome Lucent purchased Octel and made some major changes but the Octel name did continue to live. Avaya was shortly after spun off and the Octel world was on their side of the house. Your beloved aspen became the Octel Aria 250 (branch) and 350 (aspen). To be honest, these are excellent products and still have a great niche in the messaging industry. They are still very much alive and used. Avaya expects to "eventually" announce end of sale for the product and it will be supported for another 5 years beyond EOS, but we have yet to hear a speculation of the date of this.

As far as the future of the product and what's new, Aria is at it's final release, Rel 3.1.1. There are many new features over your aspen which includes the UCC suite, probably the most spectacular. Allows for 'unified communication' in that it allows you to get your email & fax through the TUI, your VM in various forms of a GUI and speech access.

Avaya's real looking-forward messaging solution is Modular Messaging, or MM. Standard server based platform, MM is really just software. Able to connect to exchange/lotus or standalone it offers much closer to true unified communication in that you have one recepticle for Voice, email and fax and have access to ALL of them from anywhere (desktop, webclient, any phone via TUI or speech access...).

Dang I almost sound like a sales guy. I know this is a PBX forum but If you have any other questions let me know, I know all of Octel; Serenade, Aria and MM. Unfortunately I don't have experience with other manufacturer's messaging platofrms other than Cisco (which is trying very hard to make their product just like Octel)

June 2nd, 2005, 01:12 PM	#3 (permalink)
OctelWarrior PBXtech SILVER 25+ posts Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 62	Re: another n00bie Well, as you know the ever-awesome Lucent purchased Octel and made some major changes but the Octel name did continue to live. Avaya was shortly after spun off and the Octel world was on their side of the house. Your beloved aspen became the Octel Aria 250 (branch) and 350 (aspen). To be honest, these are excellent products and still have a great niche in the messaging industry. They are still very much alive and used. Avaya expects to "eventually" announce end of sale for the product and it will be supported for another 5 years beyond EOS, but we have yet to hear a speculation of the date of this. As far as the future of the product and what's new, Aria is at it's final release, Rel 3.1.1. There are many new features over your aspen which includes the UCC suite, probably the most spectacular. Allows for 'unified communication' in that it allows you to get your email & fax through the TUI, your VM in various forms of a GUI and speech access. Avaya's real looking-forward messaging solution is Modular Messaging, or MM. Standard server based platform, MM is really just software. Able to connect to exchange/lotus or standalone it offers much closer to true unified communication in that you have one recepticle for Voice, email and fax and have access to ALL of them from anywhere (desktop, webclient, any phone via TUI or speech access...). Dang I almost sound like a sales guy. I know this is a PBX forum but If you have any other questions let me know, I know all of Octel; Serenade, Aria and MM. Unfortunately I don't have experience with other manufacturer's messaging platofrms other than Cisco (which is trying very hard to make their product just like Octel)