Avaya and Arowana Consulting Revolutionize Guest Experiences with IoT Technology

Hotel Guests Benefit from Access to Personalized In-room Concierge

Santa Clara, Calif. – June 28, 2017 – Avaya today announced it will showcase the in-room concierge solution suite, Houdini – Guest Experience, at HiTec Toronto from June 26 – 29. Developed by Arowana Consulting, Houdini leverages the Avaya Breeze™ Client SDK to enable in-room concierge services on the Avaya Vantage™ Device, the innovative, all-glass desktop device that combines the convenience of a desktop phone with the flexibility of an application platform.

Debuting at HiTec Toronto, the world's largest hospitality technology show, Houdini – Guest Experience is a first-of-its-kind solution suite for in-room automation aimed at hoteliers to enhance a guest’s stay, comfort level and access to services. When leveraging the Breeze Client SDK, Houdini provides a variety of features via the touchscreen on the Vantage Device.  Controlling hotel room IoT items such as in-room lighting, temperature and drapes, and managing entertainment and media, can all be done via automated interfaces. 

The open integration and extensibility of Breeze Client SDK makes it easy for hoteliers to personalize Vantage for their guests’ experience with solutions such as Houdini. With its large touchscreen display, no visible mechanical buttons, and sleek all-glass design, Vantage modernizes the guest’s in-room experience by:

• Enticing guests to eat at hotel restaurants, or at the touch of the screen, order room service utilizing a friendly on-screen menu;
• Displaying the hotel’s many services and conveniences on an intuitive, friendly user interface that can then be easily enabled via click-to-book and click-to-call; 
• Replacing any existing guest room phone for incoming and outgoing calls;
• Enabling a convenient button to quickly and easily reach a live person from the hotel staff;
• Extending the hotel Wi-Fi by proving an additional light duty access point with the same network ID as the hotel Wi-Fi system.

Arowana is one of many developers worldwide who have taken advantage of Avaya’s ongoing commitment to open platforms and built or enabled their own solutions to address vertical industry-specific IoT use cases. The easy-to-use Breeze platform provides a common, developer-friendly SDK to quickly build or enable innovative user experiences based on the full reach of Avaya customer and team engagement capabilities. Any and all functionality Avaya integrates into its own applications is available to developers through the SDK. Using this level of powerful integration, developers can mix and match contact center and unified communications functionality to create or enable solutions that improve the speed, convenience and efficiency of human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications in any type of business or industry.

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“With new business models such as Airbnb digitally disrupting the hotel industry worldwide, hoteliers are being forced not only to rethink how they engage guests online, but also how they differentiate themselves by creating intelligent, connected, automated guest room experiences,” Prince Thampi, CEO, Arowana Consulting.   “The combination of the Houdini solution suite with the Avaya Vantage Device creates a slick, modern in-room guest experience literally at the touch of a screen.  With the best-in-class features and latest technologies, Houdini- Guest Experience enables hotels to take their guest experiences to new heights while enhancing their service delivery and revenue.”

“Personalized guest experience continues to be the main competitive differentiator in the hospitality industry,” said Gary E. Barnett, SVP & GM, Engagement Solutions, Avaya. “In the midst of this industry’s digital transformation, hoteliers need to distinguish themselves from the competition with connected experiences and hi-tech personalization tools that improve the guest experience. Arowana’s focus on automating the in-room experience makes it an ideal application for the Vantage Device. We’re excited to work with developers and partners to showcase applications they’ve created or enabled via Breeze Client SDK with Avaya solutions.”

About Avaya
Avaya enables the mission critical, real-time communication applications of the world’s most important operations. As the global leader in delivering superior communications experiences, Avaya provides the most complete portfolio of software and services for contact center and unified communications with integrated, secure networking— offered on premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Today’s digital world requires some form of communications enablement, and no other company is better positioned to do this than Avaya. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

About Arowona Consulting
Arowana Consulting partners with modern businesses to help them surmount their numerous business challenges. Here, we follow the agile methodology and are adept to serve and support your requirements by minimizing risk, delivering results and exceeding expectations. At Arowana, we offer products and services that are robust and flexible besides conforming to industry standard. We encourage our employees and facilitate them to unleash the best of their creative talent to remain at the forefront of emerging technology and create an inviolable bond of trust with our customers. An Information Technology company with CMMI DEV(r) Level-3 certification, headquartered in Bangalore, India, Arowana Consulting was established in 2006. The company has its Global Development Centre in Bangalore and delivery centres in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat and New Jersey.

Certain statements contained in this press release may be forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology.  We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these are reasonable, such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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