Hewlett Packard has brought Avaya into its union partners program in a shift that will assist it fight next to Cisco by contribution more option to customers involved in united communications and contact centers.

Since of agreement, HP is able to present straight support for and training on Avaya products quite than having to collaborate case by case with retailers that are not partners.

HP and Avaya say they concur that interoperability between vendors' products is best method to go in order to give customers the broadest choices in UC and contact centers. This is in contrast to Cisco's move toward that calls for using all Cisco products.

The term of the HP-Avaya accord is three years through which HP sales and services teams will be trained and expert in Avaya UC and call center products. The agreement is a lot than a reseller agreement, HP says.

HP has a like 10-year agreement with Avaya contestant Alcatel-Lucent, and HP says it look upon these partly cover alliances as a method to hold up more options for its customers. HP as well has a UC coalition with Microsoft, but its contributions don't partly cover with Avaya's.