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.
In that sense, Breeze is less about comms app programming as it is about designing workflows. The beauty of it is, you don’t need any previous programming experience whatsoever. If you can envisage a communications solution which will improve part of your business operations or your customer service, you can build it with the API modules ready available in Breeze.
What do we like?
Breeze gets top marks for ease of use, it allows anyone to become a comms app developer. The modular drag and drop system is quick, efficient and extremely intuitive, and dramatically reduces the time it would otherwise take to build an application. It places the focus on improving workflows and real life use, not the technical nitty gritty of programming.
As a virtual development environment, it offers enormous flexibility on the solutions which can be designed, without having to plug in to lots of different hardware for testing.
Who is it for?
Avaya Breeze is an extremely useful tool for any business looking to customise or add to its UC capabilities. It will probably most interest IT departments and service providers looking to add value in critical areas, but as a workflow solution it is not only for the ICT specialist. It is also a very useful tool for business strategists looking to use technology as a means to improve internal collaboration or customer contact management.
What is it compatible with?
Breeze was developed to be fully integrated as part of Avaya’s Aura enterprise collaboration software, effectively to act as a bridge so Aura customers could easily add UC capabilities. Since then, Avaya has also built its latest omni-channel customer contact solution platform, Oceana, on top of Breeze, making Oceana deployments fully customisable.
However, Breeze is not just for existing Avaya customers. The Breeze client SDK is available to all developers and can therefore be used to programme UC apps on any platform.
Summary
There is no doubt about it, Breeze is an extremely impressive product. What shines through is Avaya’s commitment to making UC applications development simpler and more efficient. For basic functions, you couldn’t get much simpler, and it allows anyone to get into app development straightaway.
With a tool like Breeze, the focus is shifted away from the technical side of development to creatively exploring and problem solving solutions which will have the biggest impact in the real world. Avaya is to be admired for making the client SDK openly available. Overall, Breeze should have a very positive impact on the trend towards the widespread integration of UC capabilities within mainstream enterprise technology.
Have you had any experience developing apps with Breeze? What did you make of it? We’re always keen to hear your thoughts, so why not share your opinions on the comments section below? And if you know someone who a Breeze users, whether a lover or a loather, please share this article with them so they can join in the conversation too.
