Avaya Aura Communication Manager software is the open, highly-reliable and extensible IP Telephony foundation on which Avaya delivers Intelligent Communications to enterprises large and small. Communication Manager effectively scales from less than 100 users to as many as 36,000 users on a single system, and to more than one million users on a single network.

Communication Manager is an important component of the Avaya Aura next generation architecture, which consolidates several previously separate products and new components into a holistic package that makes it easier to buy everything enterprises need for Unified Communications. Communication Manager software is part of the Avaya Aura Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition packages, which bring together all the functionality needed for common customer situations with a simple per user licensing fee.

Designed to run on a variety of Linux-based media servers, Communication Manager provides centralized call control for a resilient, distributed network of media gateways and a wide range of analog, digital, and IP-based communication devices. It also has several advanced applications built-in, including mobility applications, call center features, advanced conference calling, and E911 capabilities.

Communication Manager is the foundation for building complete enterprise communication enetworks by supporting SIP, H.323 and other industry-standard communications protocols over a variety of different networks. This protocol support provides centralized voice mail, attendant operations, and call centers across multiple locations.

Evolution server:

Communication Manager as an evolution server provides Communication Manager features to both SIP and non-SIP endpoints. It uses the full call model with Communication Manager as the only supported application. As an evolution server:

• H.323, digital, and analog endpoints register with Communication Manager
• SIP endpoints register with Avaya Aura Session Manager (Release 6.0 and above)
• All endpoints receive services from Communication Manager

Session Manager routes calls from and to SIP endpoints, enabling them to communicate with all other endpoints that are connected to the Communication Manager. Developers should use Avaya Aura Application Enablement Services (AE Services) to develop applications that use underlying functionality provided by Communication Manager as an evolution server.

Feature server:

Communication Manager as a feature server provides Communication Manager features to SIP endpoints using the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) half call model. The feature server only supports SIP endpoints that are registered with Avaya Aura Session Manager. The Communication Manager server is connected to Session Manager via a SIP-ISC interface which uses an IMS-enabled SIP signaling group and associated SIP trunk group. Communication Manager as a feature server has the following constraints:

• The dial plan for IMS users must route all PSTN calls back to Session Manager over the IMS trunk group. Routing of such calls directly to ISDN trunks is not supported.
• IPSI port networks are not supported.
• Traditional phones, such as DCP, H.323, ISDN, and analog are not supported.

AE Services cannot be used with Communication Manager as a feature server.