Avaya Holdings has extended its partnership with Telarus Canada to offer the new Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral UCaaS solution through their partner networks in Canada, Avaya reported on Thursday.  

“We feel privileged to be included in the launch of Avaya Cloud Office in Canada,” said Brian Ochab, Toronto native and regional vice president of Canada for Telarus. “We have invested heavily in the Canadian market so that we can enable trusted advisors and MSPs here with solutions that are brokered rather than rebilled.”

Telarus Canada will deliver Avaya cloud communications solutions through its nationwide network of sales agents. Avaya will support the Canadian market with its unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) cloud solutions through its partnership with Telarus Canada. 

Avaya Cloud Office will provide a single platform for all communication, including calling, chat, meetings and collaboration, file and desktop sharing, and task management.

“By layering our resources, tools, engineering, and marketing knowledge of UCaaS, we’re confident we’ll be able to help our partners here develop a solid business selling and recommending Avaya Cloud Office to their clientele,” added Ochab. 

Avaya Cloud Office’s UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solution developed as part of the strategic partnership between Avaya and RingCentral. The solution will be generally available in Canada in late June 2020 to provide cloud-based UC, innovation, device interoperability and migration tools.

“Avaya Cloud Office enables users to benefit from Avaya enterprise-grade technology and capabilities with the ease and speed of the leading cloud unified communications platform to meet their unique requirements and budget. We are launching the solution in Canada this quarter, and we are excited to help drive our customers’ journey to the cloud,” said Miles Davis, vice president of Channel Sales, Avaya Canada.

About Avaya

Businesses are built on the experiences they provide, and everyday millions of those experiences are built by Avaya (NYSE: AVYA). For over one hundred years, we’ve enabled organizations around the globe to win – by creating intelligent communications experiences for customers and employees. 

Avaya builds open, converged and innovative solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration – in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both. To grow your business, we’re committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. We’re the technology company you trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) intends to standardize language in government contracts with cloud service providers to clarify terms with regard to security liability, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

“OMB has just stood up a [program management office] to work on a cloud [service level agreement] template for the federal government to be attached to every contract,” Thomas Santucci, director of the Data Center and Cloud Optimization Infrastructure program management office at the General Services Administration, said Wednesday at a Digital Government Institute-hosted virtual conference.

He noted that security was one of the topics cited in developing the new templates for cloud contracts.

Santucci added that he believes there is a need to update cloud SLAs and that his team is working on that within GSA. He also mentioned how the COVID-19 pandemic prompted some agencies to advance their move to the cloud.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has tested six commercially available contactless fingerprinting technologies and found that such platforms performed better than contact-based devices when scanning multiple prints against a database.

NIST said Tuesday it released an interagency report titled “Interoperability Assessment 2019: Contactless-to-Contact Fingerprint Capture” and used four smartphone-based contactless technologies as well as two standalone contactless platforms to fingerprint 200 volunteers. The agency said it also used two contact devices as part of the study.

According to NIST’s report, contactless devices performed with a 60 to 70 percent accuracy compared to contact devices’ 99.5 percent record for single-finger capture. However, NIST found that contactless devices reached around 90 to 95 percent accuracy and garnered low “false positive” rates when scanning multiple finger combinations.

“One objective of the NIST study was to evaluate the interoperability of these contactless representations with older print impressions,” NIST said. “In short, how well do the new contactless devices match their scans with existing database entries?”

The report will serve as an update to NIST’s report on contactless capture issued in 2018 to aid organizations in deploying fingerprint-scanning capabilities.

The U.S. Marine Corps has commenced an effort to modernize the infantry weapons, complementary optics and other related systems used in the service.

USMC said Tuesday its Program Manager for Infantry Weapons or PM IW is working to align with the vision of Gen. David Berger, Marine Corps commandant, to thrive in the competition of power.

The service branch intends to adopt and employ many new infantry systems within the next 10 years.

For example, PM IW has already begun to purchase the Modular Handgun System, a pistol that allows for modular grip changing to accommodate a variety of hand sizes. MCSC plans to field this new gun in the current fiscal year as a replacement to current marine pistols.

The command is also further implementing the M27 automatic rifle that has received positive feedback since the weapon’s initial launching nine years ago.

Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division pursues prototyping of autonomous detection systems via other transaction authority, an alternative, accelerated procurement approach.

NSWC Crane said Tuesday it employs Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems or S2MARTS OTAs to rapidly develop and test the Autonomous Fiber Optic Sensor Network prototype.

OTAs streamline contracting processes to allow for faster and more flexible research and development. This approach applies to nontraditional contractors and other special cases.

A-FOSN is designed to detect cases of intrusions in naval facilities either afloat or on the ground.

"This solution can detect these various potential threats in real-time and across diverse terrain," said Brooke Pyne, director of S2MARTS.

Julie Doerge, who leads NSWC Crane's sensor qualification laboratory, said the S2MARTS OTAs have allowed the Navy to remain up to date with industry's latest technology.