Avaya has always prided itself on pioneering new approaches to enterprise communications. The Californian endpoint and software developer was one of the first to take seriously the possibility of combining single solution comms platforms into unified, multimedia solutions, and was also early on the integration of collaboration software with UC.
The company has also fostered a long and productive relationship with developers. Its DevConnect programme has supported thousands of application developers in programming their own bespoke communications solutions, whether as part of in-house teams or as niche vendors and service providers.
Breeze is Avaya’s bid to move that relationship forward and offer a single, integrated, easy to deploy development platform for programming new communications and collaboration applications. It is an update on the company’s earlier Engagement Development Platform, and like EDP aims to replace all of the company’s previous software development kits (SDKs), which tended to be platform specific, with a single environment that can be deployed with any device or system.
Avaya clearly sees a gap in the market. While app development for mobile, social networking and workspace collaboration has exploded this decade, support for programming UC functions into them has remained fragmented. This makes the process inefficient and adds costs. Breeze is Avaya’s bid to right that issue.
In this review, we will be looking at just what Avaya Breeze is capable of, and whether it offers developers any advantage over previous SDKs. But before we start, please remember - Comms Trader reviews are completely independent and impartial. We do not endorse, market or have any role in the sale of any product. Our purpose is to inform our readers and help company managers, IT buyers and service providers get an insight into products before they make purchasing decisions.
How Does It Look?
The main Breeze interface is called Engagement Designer. The main workspace is a drag and drop window where you build a workflow for the communications application you are designing. To the left of the screen is a list of ready loaded modules which you simply click and drag into the main window to arrange as required. For an application development platform, it is extremely straightforward, easy to navigate and not unlike the sort of thing you could use to teach programming to young children.
What Can It Do?
The whole idea of Breeze is to make it extremely quick and easy to develop comms applications. Avaya calls the created applications ‘snap ins’ because the main vision is to create comms functions which can then be added, or ‘snapped in’, to existing programmes - so called ‘communications enablement’.
So, for example, if you want to embed Click to Call or Video Chat buttons directly into your website or mobile applications, you can create a snap for that. If you want a way to pool customer contact data from different touch points to improve the consistency of service, you can create a snap for that. If you want to create links to special offers to send via SMS which are triggered when a customer completes a survey, you can create a snap for that.
In fact, pretty much any function you can think of involving communications - video, voice, SMS, IM, presence, email, customer services, database access and much more - Breeze allows you to create a snap in for it.
Ok, that in itself is nothing particularly impressive - people have known how to programme UC applications for quite some time now. But what is impressive about Breeze is how easy the Engagement Designer interface makes it.
Instead of having to write Javascript, Breeze offers a large library of preloaded, ready coded communication and collaboration APIs. Each API module is simply dragged and dropped into the main design screen to create a workflow for a functioning snap in. If you can draw your communications solution, you can create it in Breeze.