Addressing nearly 2,000 people at the VoiceCon Spring 2006 conference in Florida, Peterson said half of North American corporate voice lines will be converted to IP technology by 2009, making possible new levels of competitive differentiation.
"Customers are increasingly turning to Avaya as they re-imagine how they can manage their operations using Intelligent Communications," said Peterson. "Avaya's open standards-based approach to integrating communications into business processes gives companies the flexibility to use our solutions as they choose, to support their unique needs and drive improved results."
Speaking to a theme of "Exploring What's Possible in Intelligent Communications," Peterson said that moving voice into co-operative networks with data is an elementary step in laying the groundwork for what lies ahead. Putting voice applications into a modular, service-oriented architecture offers opportunities for forward-looking enterprises to build such applications as conferencing on demand and speech-recognition access directly into business data and process applications.
For IT professionals, this means more creative power, via a more simplified format with the ability to "drag and drop" a communications service into a programming scheme for business process. Peterson also discussed how the end-user/employee experience is changing.
“Today, a discontinuous user experience means various network types and devices from different vendors often isolate the user from the business tools and resources they need quickly and most frequently.” According to Peterson, more ubiquitous, consistent access to and from customers, colleagues, information and tools provided over any type of device or network will enhance employee collaboration and effectiveness while reducing costs and complexity for the business.