Avaya Media Processing Core Wins Most Innovative Product of 2022

The Avaya Media Processing Core uses unique patented frictionless AI integration technology to dramatically accelerate multi-experience innovation.

The Avaya Media Processing Core (MPC) just won the “Most Innovative Product” award from UCToday. This new cloud-native service is designed to power the next generation of communications applications.  It sits at the heart of the Avaya “Core + Four” architecture.  Its multi-tenant, multi-app design hides the complexity associated with developing, hosting, controlling, and scaling complex real-time media services.  It delivers the best of both security and simplicity, quality and scalability, and flexibility and consistency to accelerate multi-experience innovation. 

By definition, every innovation requires a challenge or obstacle that must be overcome.  The importance of media processing in today’s world cannot be overstated — and this new innovation solves a key business challenge. In this case, the challenge is how to add AI services into the media mix of voice, video, and chat. 

Todd Zerbe, Avaya’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, introduced it at the Avaya Engage customer conference last December.  The Avaya MPC completely redefines how media is processed.  It moves video processing from the edge of the network into the cloud — using cloud-based MCUs to decode, composite, and re-encode the video for each connected endpoint.  This new approach has many advantages, but the primary benefit is a dramatic acceleration of AI integration into business workflows.  An excellent example of this is the AI Noise Removal feature delivered to Avaya UC endpoints.

You will hear Avaya often discuss today’s “Everything Customer.”  Gartner created this term to represent the challenge of serving consumers that seem to want everything with many wants seemingly in conflict — such as wanting to be connected but also left alone, to be treated equally but served uniquely, to enjoy experiences that are fully featured but also effortless, and for these experiences to be consistent and expected but also be surprised with the unexpected.  Much has been discussed about this concept in terms of end consumers.

The wants and needs of today’s business customers have similarities to this concept in that the experiences they require often involve clear tradeoffs, especially when it comes to communications architecture.  Simplicity and Security have been at odds for some time.   As have Quality and Scalability; and Flexibility and Consistency.

This is where the Avaya Media Processing Core represents several significant technological “breakthroughs.” To provide truly “frictionless” AI integration into communications media processing requires delivering the “best of both”…

…Security and Simplicity

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Up until now, media processing has been a trade off between complex protocols to navigate various security controls and simple solutions that did not adequately consider security.   

The Avaya Media Processing Core abstracts the complexities of discovering, allocating, controlling, and scaling media resources to simplify application logic.  Cloud to SIP translation delivers security while eliminating potential firewall issues.  A universal connection anchoring model also deeply simplifies the complexity found in most telephony and video networks.  Instead of transferring calls around the network to acquire various media resources and connect voice paths, the Avaya MPC delivers media resources on demand to each anchor point. 

…Quality and Scalability

“Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems that we created with our current patterns of thought.” – Albert Einstein

It’s one thing to ensure quality communications when there are only a few connected endpoints.  But today’s communications require many multiple connections with people, things, and processes – many of which are outside the control of the IT team (and the control of a quality UX).  With Avaya’s new approach, capacity and quality are no longer trade-offs. 

First, the disassociation of quality with the reliance on the processing capabilities of each particular endpoint immediately enhances the end-user experience. How many of us have been frustrated in the past by slow pixelization or audio jitter caused by our device trying to process too many instructions at once?  This new approach dramatically reduces this occurrence.

Second, AI-enhanced CODECS with strong transport resiliency deliver excellent quality over any type of network, including impaired and unmanaged ones.  The Avaya MPC delivers High Frame Rate web collaboration and is designed for real-time latency-sensitive workloads.  It is elastically scalable with global reach — leveraging 12 distributed edge media processing regions in service to provide a 1200 percent range of resource expansion/contract per day following the sun. 

Finally, being able to introduce a single common AI service across the network to every endpoint significantly reduces risk and enables a high-quality and scalable service rollout. 

A greener (uses less power) and more efficient (uses less bandwidth) business is also a fantastic side benefit of this approach.

…Flexibility and Consistency

“Consistency is found in that work whose whole and detail are suitable to the occasion.  It arises from circumstance, custom and nature.” – Vitruvius

The Avaya Media Processing Core has strong media processing capabilities, including full HD GPU accelerated video processing, web collaboration, recording, ASR, TTS, transcription, WebRTC, IVR, and AI algorithms and frameworks.  Its unique and patented hybrid SFU/processed video architecture enables massive scale with minimal bandwidth requirements, enabling 60+ visible and thousands of real-time participants per conference on any device.  It has immediate recording playback and meets vertical compliance standards. 

But to serve the disparate needs of today’s businesses, strength must be also paired with flexibility.  The Avaya MPC provides the choice of media switching or processing or both.  It provides native full-stack WebRTC support including a global TURN edge service and multi-vendor endpoint and SDK support. 

It also delivers consistency in the form of zero-downtime upgrades and maintenance.  And it’s cloud-native from the ground up (deployed in the public cloud using the Google Cloud Platform).

The Avaya Media Processing Core is Ready Now to Elevate Your Business Communications

What I like best about the UCToday awards is that the competition is judged by a select set of the industry’s best analysts.  I’m sure I speak for everyone at Avaya when I say that we appreciate the recognition of these industry experts in designating the Avaya Media Processing Core to be the Most Innovative Product of 2022.

To summarize, here are the outcomes the Avaya Media Processing Core can deliver to your business:

• Increase Your Agility:  Build new AI-powered workflows in hours and transparently deliver continuous innovation
• Elevate Employee and Customer Experiences: Deliver consistency across touchpoints and modalities
• Be Greener:  Lower your energy consumption
• Be More Efficient: Use less bandwidth and simplify AI integration and app deployment
• Reduce Your Risk:  Rest well at night knowing you are using a platform that delivers unrivaled uptime, scale, compliance, and security

If this sounds good to you, take a look at this e-book that goes into much more detail about the power, capabilities, and business impact of the Avaya MPC, and learn more about Avaya cloud communications innovation.  Then contact your Avaya representative to discuss how to add the Avaya MPC’s capabilities to your communications architecture.