Avaya, Juniper team up for secure IP telephony

Avaya Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. have tightened a partnership to bring security together with the next wave of enterprise telephony.

Avaya will resell Juniper security products alongside its own IP (Internet Protocol) telephony gear and offer integration and support for both, the companies said Wednesday. Some channel partners of the two vendors will also be able to offer that package, said Lawrence Byrd, director of IP telephony and mobility at Avaya.

Many large enterprises are phasing in IP telephony, but security is the number one concern of IT administrators and has to come into play with any deployment, according to Frank Dzubeck, president of consultancy Communications Network Architects Inc., in Washington, D.C. The Juniper-Avaya partnership is a clear competitive move against Cisco Systems Inc., which provides integrated security and IP telephony capabilities in gear such as the popular ISR (Integrated Services Router) platform for small and medium-sized businesses and branch offices, Dzubeck said. Many in the industry have been expecting a new product jointly developed by Juniper and Avaya that would compete directly with the ISR, he said.

The partners did not announce any new products on Wednesday. Instead, they unveiled the fruits of cooperation and of integration work that began last May. As a result of that work, they know Avaya IP telephony gear will work smoothly with Juniper capabilities such as security and WAN (wide-area network) optimization, Byrd said. Among other things, that interoperability can head off problems that IP calls have run into on secured networks, he added.

“A lot of early firewall products did a lot of damage to voice,” Byrd said. In the process of protecting networks from harmful data packets, firewalls sometimes degraded call quality, he said.

Specifically, the companies want to help enterprises set up distributed IP voice capabilities throughout their facilities worldwide, including branch offices. Using the Juniper products, Avaya can provide for firewalls, VPNs (virtual private networks) and intrusion detection tools to secure the network while supporting IP calls, Byrd said. The partners also can provide features beyond security, such as WAN optimization to make sure there’s enough bandwidth for calls, he said.

Also with the combined offerings, enterprises can help employees work at home and on the road, as well as distributing call-center capabilities to multiple offices and even home-based workers, Byrd said.

Avaya’s 7,000-strong service force, Avaya Global Services, will offer network and security assessments as well as full service and support for the combined deployments of Juniper and Avaya gear, he said. It can also provide management and maintenance of the networks as a managed service.

Avaya, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, is the biggest threat to Cisco in IP telephony and Juniper, in Sunnyvale, California, is its key rival in high-end routing, so it’s not surprising that they’re taking on the dominant LAN vendor together, analyst Dzubeck said. One thing Cisco doesn’t have is a services organization that can work with gear from multiple vendors, he said. Avaya’s Byrd played that up as a key advantage on Wednesday: Avaya can set up and secure IP telephony for an enterprise even if it uses a network from another vendor, he said.

The joint offering will become available in February in North America and later this year in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, rolling out still later this year in the Asia-Pacific region, Byrd said. Although the program won’t yet be offered in other parts of the world, multinational enterprises in North America can kick off global deployments in February if they go direct to Avaya, he said.