Octel Aria and Serenade systems were made by Octel Communications, a voice mail company that was founded in 1982 by Robert Cohen and Peter Olsen.  Most of the voice mail systems that were available at the time were made by major companies like IBM and their voice mail systems were large and expensive. Other voice mail systems were made by PBX companies and usually only with the manufacturer's telephone system.  Almost no other system (Centigram was one of the exceptions) worked with the majority of PBX systems available. Octel became very successful and grew rapidly in the 80’s and 90’s.

Octel went public in 1988. In 1992, Octel acquired Tigon (from Ameritech) and became the world's largest hosted voice mail provider. In 1994, Octel merged with VMX Inc. In 1997, Lucent paid $1.8 billion to acquire Octel and was later spun off as part of Avaya Inc. in September 2000.

Octel  voice mail systems are now end of life and no longer supported by Avaya after June, 2011

Octel Models:

Octel 250 and Octel 350 (Aria™) Capacities:

• The Octel 250 has 4-72 ports, 945 storage hours and 15,000 mail boxes
• The Octel 350 has 12-144 ports, 1,350 storage hours and 30,000 mail boxes

Octel 200 and Octel 300 (Serenade™) Capacities:

• The Octel 200 has 4-64 ports, 5-540 storage hours and 100-5000 mail boxes
• The Octel 300 has 4-128 ports, 5- 1,085 storage hours and 100-10,000 mail boxes