ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence uses Avaya enterprise-class IP communications to help create world-class athletes

ASPIRE aims at training the region's best young sporting talent to turn them into world-class athletes. The ASPIRE Academy, the first of its kind in the Middle East region, provides high standard sporting and educational facilities for up and coming athletes, and is now supported by a state-of-the-art technology infrastructure from Avaya.

Soubhi Abdulkarim, IT Manager of ASPIRE explained: "Technology has become an integral part of sports development, with many different elements of an athlete's training using technology and very specific applications. We, at ASPIRE, aim to create an environment where all of these different applications are integrated together, so that we can monitor our students' performances and then automatically store that data in a database. This enables sports scientists and coaches to easily access and analyse an individual's data from wherever they are on campus, and appropriately adapt training programs, provide factual feedback to students etc. Avaya's IP telephony solutions, provide a robust, flexible communications infrastructure, form a vital part of that vision."

"Avaya's IP telephony solutions were very attractive to us for a number of reasons," continued Abdulkarim. "A key factor in the decision was the fact that Avaya uses open standards-based technology enabling easy integration with existing and future technology platforms and applications thus protecting our investments. Delivery and installation of the solutions were handled quickly and efficiently and we have had no interoperability problems at all with Avaya solutions."

The entire ASPIRE campus is now connected using Avaya S8700 media server and G650 media gateways running Communication Manager 2.2 software, and Avaya IP telephones including 3616 wireless handsets, PDAs and notebooks equipped with Avaya's IP Softphone - a software telephone that allows users to connect to the converged voice and data network straight from their PC or handheld device. The Avaya IP telephony system includes a wide range of features including easy to use conference calling, unified fax, email and voice messaging and Extension to Cellular, which can automatically route calls to a mobile phone if the user is away from their desk

"Avaya is very pleased to be playing a part in enabling ASPIRE to realize its goals of creating a world-class sporting academy for the Middle East," said Nidal Abou-Ltaif, Managing Director of Avaya Middle East and North Africa. "We wish ASPIRE every success in taking young sporting talent from the region and turning them into world class athletes."