Revamped Avaya Roadmap Orbits Around Cloud, Experience Platform

The UC giant’s updated product roadmap reflects Avaya’s plan to tap into its massive install base and pave the way for migration to the cloud or the addition of over-the-top cloud solutions that won’t “disrupt” communications infrastructure that’s already in place, the company tells CRN.

Avaya experienced a turbulent 2022 with missed revenue targets and earnings, layoffs, and a new CEO brought on to redirect the company. Now, the unified communications powerhouse is unveiling an updated and simplified product roadmap.

The company is placing a larger emphasis on the omnichannel Avaya Experience platform, the centerpiece of its cloud strategy, in a way that both addresses the market demand for all-in-one for contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions, while balancing the needs of its massive install base of customers, Steve Forcum, head of Solutions Marketing for Avaya, told CRN.

“What we want to do is we want to meet our customers where they are. Experience Platform is an incredible piece of tech, but at the end of the day, moving what works in your organization to a different platform simply to add these capabilities is a lot of times a nonstarter for our customers,” he said.

The Avaya Experience Platform is the company’s “North Star” in which the rest of Avaya’s portfolio orbits, Forcum said. The goal of the platform is to empower organizations to support the touch points that occur between the business or brand and the end customers, but then weaving them into an ongoing discussion. “This is really where the magic happens,” he said. “If I’m in a discussion with a customer and they tell me that two weeks ago, they spoke to someone, I can actually go back in time [and] see who that person was talking to and pull up the transcript of what was said. This way, I can pick that conversation where and when it left off and then treat it like a relay race for the next employee that’s going to interact with this customer.”

The next step will include harvesting the data collected by the platform and turning it into actionable information for partners and end customers that go beyond simple performance metrics, Forcum said.

[Related: Avaya CEO Calls For ‘Innovation Without Disruption’ For Enterprises]

Avaya is still the largest premise-based UC provider on the market, which gives partners the unique ability to transition or even partially transition customers to the cloud based on their requirements, according to the company. There are many customers that aren’t looking to rip and replace their existing premise-architected communications solutions, but they may be interested in moving to the cloud for contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) or an omnichannel collaboration solution, Avaya’s new CEO Alan Masarek told CRN in September.

“The beauty is, no one wants to go through that loss of the rip and replace. We can uniquely provide what competitors can’t. A competing [solution], by definition, is a complete rip and replace. Ours is not. It’s innovation without disruption and that really resonates with customers and partners,” Masarek said.

Offering innovation without disruption starts with Avaya’s customer base currently on the Avaya Aura and Contact Center Elite platforms, which make up the bulk of Avaya’s 100 million-seat install base, Forcum said.

Most of these customers have these solutions deployed in their data centers, he added. “The first thing we’re communicating to these customers is that if it ain’t broke, you don’t need to fix it. If your voice is routing properly, if you’ve got all these applications intertwined and you don’t want to move that to somewhere else, you don’t have to.”

This strategy will allow partners to help their customers “upgrade in place,” while keeping the existing platform current, while buying the product on a perpetual license or if they move to a subscription model. “You can pull down services from Experience Platform to add to that environment … we’re empowering further choice,” Forcum said.

Avaya in 2023 will be launching a unified client for Contact Center Elite and the Experience Platform to give users a single sign-on and pane of glass with which to view customer interactions. Avaya will also be adding an over-the-top integration between the Experience Platform and Avaya IP Office for VoIP, Forcum added.

For customers that are ready to go all-in on cloud for their communications needs, Avaya is ready to move IP Office users to Avaya Cloud Office (ACO), its UC offering based on the RingCentral platform. ACO and the Experience Platform are already fully integrated for combined UC and CCaaS needs.

Avaya said it plans on introducing more than 300 new features and enhancements to its communications solutions over the course of 2023.

Removing Complexity

In going live with its updated product roadmap, Avaya wanted to stress clarity and simplicity, Forcum said.

One of the first places the Durham, N.C.-based company is starting is injecting clarity within its product naming convention, which has been “conceptual” and will now be more “tangible,” Forcum said. For example, the company’s OneCloud CCaaS cloud-based contact center solution is now referred to as the Avaya Experience Platform. Avaya OneCloud Private, its private cloud offering, is now Avaya Enterprise Cloud as a nod to the offering’s strength with large customers, the company said.

“This is an ongoing effort that will be applying to other areas of our product portfolio to make it easier to understand when we’re explaining solutions, and when customers are looking at different products, and what we’re actually aiming at,” he said.

The embattled company, in addition to simplifying its product portfolio, has also been working on “right sizing the organization. Avaya in September initiated cost-cutting measures that includes an unspecified number of layoffs following its plan announced in July to begin “significant” cost-cutting measures to the tune of $225 million to $250 million during the company’s last fiscal quarter.

“As previously stated, lowering our costs, including through a reduction in our workforce, is necessary to position Avaya as a more agile and innovative organization and to align Avaya’s cost structure with our contractual, recurring revenue business model,” said Avaya CEO Alan Masarek in a statement regarding the layoffs two months ago.

Masarek said the company’s “reset” has required difficult decisions across the organizations and within Avaya’s portfolio, but said the changes are “necessary” to facilitate the company’s software transformation, in a blog post published on Tuesday.

Avaya has about 90,000 customers globally, according to the company.