Avaya recently hosted industry analysts at its Customer Experience Management event to describe and expand on its direction for contact center customers. Faced with a large installed base of legacy products, Avaya is setting a clear direction to help its customers gain value by leveraging their existing investments and moving forward with new applications for customer support. Avaya’s direction is to simplify its offerings with more bundled solutions and give its customers new options for implementation. Its vision for going forward includes investments in improved speech analytics and predictive analytics, mobile support and cloud solutions. Avaya recognizes the need to offer its existing Avaya and legacy Nortel customers with a well-defined strategy and path for upgrading existing contact center applications with expanded next generation customer support options.
Avaya’s open mobile collaboration platform simplifies customer support by using the same tools to address unified communications and contact centers. This significantly reduces time and effort to support applications and ultimately reduces support costs. Another significant change is its shift from premise-based solutions to virtual solutions. Its virtual solution supports an integrated multiple channel platform including social, mobile and the Web, which offers proactive personalized and customer aware interactions across all channels.
Although a recognized leader in contact center solutions, Avaya lost market share in recent years to competitors, notably Cisco and Genesys at the high end and Interactive Intelligence in the mid-market segments. Avaya recognizes this and has reorganized to assertively secure its market and grow its base. It intends to do this with robust offerings in social, mobile, cloud and analytic solutions. Future directions include solutions to harness Big Data from multiple sources and to deliver comprehensive reporting to help its customers gain higher value from customer interactions. Additionally, its recent announcements of Open Virtual Applicance format (OVA), which is a pre-packaged file type that contains all the software files needed to install an application in a virtual machine. This makes it easier to install and manage contact center apps, and has created new interest for customers looking for an open solution.
Avaya has made several acquisitions during recent years to shore up its product offerings and expressed plans to continue to evaluate new innovative software solutions. It is making a firm commitment to giving customers a choice of CAPEX premise solutions, OPEX cloud solutions or hybrid cloud offerings. Importantly, component system and new enhancements will run on both platforms and help customers leverage investments made without requiring a full system replacement.
In the services area, Avaya offers professional services directly and through its many channel partners. It views its services offering as an area of high growth and competitive differentiation. A good move for its partners is the give them the ability to quickly get pricing quotes for products and services, many within a one day turn around.
After years of reorganization and product direction confusion due to its Nortel acquisition, Avaya seems to have emerged with renewed focus and sense of clear purpose. Its executive team, many recruited for leadership accomplishments in competitive industries is setting a new pace for Avaya. While the challenge to change Avaya from a legacy equipment provider to an innovative software leader is not going to occur overnight, I believe they have assembled the right talent mix at the top of its Customer Experience Management team to make this happen. A key factor to success, however, will depend on its many partners fully understanding and selling its vision and managing and maintaining strong service support for existing customers, as they evaluate and embrace new applications.