Avaya seeks to translate enterprise call-center success into 911 sector moving to NG911

Avaya is positioned well to deliver 911 solutions that provide NG911 functionality and enable a smooth migration path, both in terms of technological upgrades and a consolidation shift that Fletcher believes is inevitable.

“You’re seeing centers consolidate, either physically or virtually,” Fletcher said. “80% of the PSAPs are four seats [or less], and they can’t survive—from a technology perspective—in that space anymore. They’ve got to consolidate, either virtually or physically.

“Physically doesn’t always make sense, because I still need those people locally to backfill other tasks, but virtually makes a lot of sense. Because IP technology has advanced to the state that it’s in, because ESInet deployments have advancing to the state that they’re in, they’re providing that backbone architecture that allows people to virtualize now.

“This is where Avaya comes in with our backend. If you look at it, we’ve brought several industries through this digital transformation over the past couple of decades—airlines, banking, and the commercial space. They’ve already realized that their customers have become digitally transformed, and they had to change the way that they’re doing business.”

Fletcher said that these enterprise industries increasingly are migrating their business to the cloud, both to increase accessibility to information and to better ensure its availability.

“We know what we’re doing, and we know how to do it efficiently,” he said.

One key benefit of NG911 is the ability for PSAPs to access information from disparate databases, including enterprise information through the Sentry product now sold by Avaya that provides significant data-correlation and data-collection capabilities, Fletcher said.

“Those are tremendous data stores that can be queried when there’s an emergency—just like a RapidSOS, just like a Smart911, it’s an additional data source,” Fletcher said. “It’s what next-generation 911 and the NENA i3 model is really all about.

“We’re bringing it to show that the data does exist, it will continue to increase in availability, and public-safety needs to know about that—that they can start reaching out into those environments and start pulling in this data.”

Avaya also plans to leverage Breeze, the company’s own workflow-automation tool that could be used to help PSAPs process increased amounts of information more efficiently and relieve 911 personnel from executing many repetitive tasks that are required today, Fletcher said.

“Breeze is a commercial product that is used to solve business workflow problems in a contact center,” Fletcher said. “By having that workflow engine, we can now start to automate specific functions … Breeze could be a platform that automate the ALI dip, automates the location query, automates things on the map.

“It’s a big flowchart script engine. And the cool part about it is, you don’t have to know any code. If you can draw a flow chart and can think it, you can build it—answer the phone, read this data, look up this information, display this to the call-taker. If you can plot it out in a flowchart, you can build, design, modify and dynamically change your Breeze environment.”