Santa Clara, Calif. – October 5, 2020 – Avaya (NYSE: AVYA), a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, is integrating powerful cloud AI solutions from NVIDIA to increase the impact and value of visual, audible and collaborative experiences through the Avaya Spaces™ app. The innovative new capabilities enabled by this integration are being unveiled at NVIDIA GTC, running October 5-9.
Avaya Spaces is an all-in-one video collaboration app for the digital workplace that changes the way work gets done. Avaya Spaces is used by businesses, schools, governments and organizations in nearly 100 countries to bring together distributed groups of people instantly with immersive work spaces where they can message, meet, share content, manage tasks and collaborate in the cloud. Announced separately by NVIDIA today, the NVIDIA Maxine cloud-native streaming video AI platform features a broad collection of cloud-based audio, video, and conversational AI software that enhances the video conferencing user experience.
“Millions of users around the world rely on Avaya’s award-winning unified communications and collaboration solutions to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences,” said Anthony Bartolo, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Avaya. “With NVIDIA’s leadership in artificial intelligence and Avaya’s 20 years of innovation, we’re able to deliver AI from the cloud and cost-effectively scale to help address the rapid growth in meetings and collaboration in a work-from-anywhere world.”
Combining NVIDIA Maxine with Avaya Spaces brings to life an entirely new level of market-defining, AI-powered meeting capabilities. Customers will benefit from background noise removal, virtual green screen backgrounds, rich presenter features enabling presenters to be overlaid on top of presentation content, as well as live transcriptions that can recognize and differentiate voices. NVIDIA GPU computing and the NGC software catalog in Google Cloud empower Avaya to deliver these AI features cost effectively, scaling to address the rapid growth in video meetings and collaboration occurring with the acceleration of remote work. Importantly, this significantly reduces end-user device requirements, allowing these advanced features to be available broadly without the need to use any specialized hardware or even update the camera.
“Video communication has become an essential tool for everyone working and studying remotely,” said Ian Buck, Vice President and General Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “With the NVIDIA Maxine software platform running on NVIDIA GPU computing in the cloud, Avaya Spaces customers will be able to enjoy more engaging video conferencing experiences with real-time AI features that can stream easily to millions of laptops, tablets and mobile phones.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted video from being a lightly used tool to something used by almost everyone, all day long, and this trend is likely to continue,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst with ZK Research. “A recent ZK Research Work From Anywhere Study revealed that post-pandemic, the number of remote workers will jump from 22 percent to 40 percent and almost all ‘meetings’ will include video. While Avaya Spaces is a collaboration app that is much more than video, the AI powered capabilities built into NVIDIA Maxine create better meetings, and by teaming up with NVIDIA, Avaya can provide state of the art AI capabilities to deliver an enhanced experience to its massive install base.”
