Moving Media to the Cloud Can Accelerate Your Business

Avaya has always played a leading role in innovation for global business communications. And we continue to be the trusted partner for leading-edge solutions that deliver major business value.

I am especially excited about our recent release of an innovative new architecture for media processing in the Avaya Experience Platform™, our CCaaS solution that can help transform your contact center. And I believe that you should be excited about it, too.

This innovation was released in October via our Media Processing Core (MPC),s a state-of-the-art cloud innovation. It can be challenging to appreciate the MPC’s differentiation from other media solutions because those differences are technical and based on experience. Statements like “improved audio”, “lower bandwidth” and “noise cancelation” can sound a bit boring in the world of AI, Big Data, and highly visual innovations in technologies like the Metaverse. After all, hasn’t this media stuff all been done before?

Short answer: No. Not like this. Ever.  

When you experience the difference, the boring becomes exciting, and the full ROI of this technology comes to life in terms of higher customer satisfaction, reduced talk times, simpler administration, and far fewer reports of poor audio quality. It delivers incredible value and experiences that matter to our customers, and their customers.

This post is my attempt to articulate that differentiation and why this exceptional innovation claim can only be made by Avaya. To make this point I will focus on two key areas of the architecture: the global nature of the service, and the fact that all processing happens in the cloud.

MPC is a Globally Networked Service.

The Media layer in most other solutions is deployed by region. In advanced media solutions, the media can be processed in separate locations from the application service to improve latency and utilize high bandwidth or QoS-enabled links. In media solutions that are deployed by region, however, users, stations, or queues are “homed” to a particular region. Configuration determines where media is processed irrespective of who the end user is talking to, where the call originated, or where the agents are working from.  All their media will be handled by the same regional service. To overcome this, vendors must introduce more and more complexity into their regionalization rules to avoid the outcomes of not making the best choice of where to home the media processing:  degraded audio or video, which also then results in increased talk time, reduced customer satisfaction and internal cases and escalations.

With MPC there is a single global entry point, and the solution scales globally across regions to provide the best experience to the end user. Using AI, the media processing is placed in the most optimal location, without complex regionalization rules. The media can even be moved between regions should a particular conference be better serviced in a different location. This means improved audio/video and a much simpler system to administrate. It also means lower talk times and fewer cases escalated to either IT or the vendor.

MPC does all its Media processing in the Cloud.

Many solutions rely on endpoints to do transcoding or to combine audio and video streams. You see this with almost every mainstream collaboration tool out there. When the number of participants goes up, bandwidth consumption increases, the local compute burden increases, and quality decreases. That is because in most solutions when you have a multiple-party conference, the combining of the multiple video streams happens at the endpoint.   

With MPC, even in a 100-person conference, only ONE audio/video stream is sent to the endpoint, because the media is transcoded, combined, and re-encoded in the cloud.  This reduces bandwidth and processing for the endpoint, but the most amazing outcome is enabling more advanced features like AI noise reduction.   With MPC the noise is removed for ALL endpoints because the noise removal happens in the cloud. So, whether you are listening to an agent working at home, or you are the call center agent listening to your valued customer in an airport, both sides of the conversation are heard clearly.    

Avaya’s AI noise removal is far superior to other noise cancelation because we control where the processing occurs and can utilize very specialized GPUs for this capability. No more keyboard clicks, sirens, barking, crying, door slamming, pencil tapping, or other frequently occurring background noises that cause people to have to repeat themselves, leading to poor experiences and increased talk times.  

Finally, because the MPC is native WebRTC and because it is processing all the media in the cloud, it can take advantage of newer and more complex codecs and codec features. These adaptive codecs offer features like forward error correction and packet loss concealment. It’s just one more ingredient in the secret sauce that makes Avaya’s media processing stand out well ahead of the competition. There’s a good reason that it recently won the “Most Innovative Product” award from UCToday.

So maybe specifications like “Full HD video conference over 480kbps” don’t wow you.  Or you do not get hot under the collar for sub-50ms failover times.  But just take it for a ride and experience the power of MPC innovation.  You can do this by trying our Avaya Spaces® collaboration app or signing up for an Avaya Experience Platform trial. Or plan to join us at Avaya ENGAGE™   in Orlando, June 18-21. In any case, seeing (or in this case, experiencing) is believing and I’ll bet you will be just as impressed as your customers.