Avaya Partners with Microsoft to Deliver OneCloud Solutions on Microsoft Azure

An expanding partnership between Avaya and Microsoft promises to increase organizational productivity and customer engagement. It pairs the Avaya OneCloud collaboration services portfolio with Microsoft Azure.

Avaya says its customers will be able to deploy in a hybrid, public or private cloud environment. The partnership builds on the success of Avaya OneCloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure.

Avaya’s David Austin

David Austin is senior vice president, strategy and alliances at Avaya.

“Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is an important milestone in our continued transformation to a cloud business model,” Austin said. “The global scale of Microsoft helps ensure that our joint customers rapidly deploy Avaya OneCloud solutions in any cloud environment of their choice with speed, agility and cost competitiveness. This represents a tremendous opportunity for customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud, and a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to expand our go-to-market reach through the co-selling efforts we have identified with our trusted partner.”

Additional Opportunities

Casey McGee is vice president of global ISV partner sales at Microsoft. He said many of Microsoft’s largest customers have standardized on Avaya communications solutions. Offering Avaya OneCloud on Microsoft Azure gives them an additional opportunity to benefit from their investments. They can accelerate their cloud migration at the same time.

Microsoft’s Casey McGee

“Together, we are working to help customers around the world transform their businesses and drive digital transformation and implement workload migration initiatives more rapidly,” McGee said. “This is a significant opportunity, particularly for Microsoft customers as they move more workloads to Azure.”

Avaya has achieved co-sell ready status. This means the company can work directly with Microsoft sales teams and partners on joint selling and enablement opportunities.

AI Technology

Ray Wang is CEO of Constellation Research.

“The addition of Avaya OneCloud to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace provides customers with the agility to create communications and collaboration experiences using the public, private or hybrid cloud delivery approaches to offer the broadest range of options to fit an organization’s needs,” Wang said. “By partnering with Microsoft on both enablement and go-to-market, Avaya gains expanded customer reach and a significant new influencing channel to broadcast its unique agility and experience proposition. Further, organizations gain the benefit of expertise from these two global leaders to advance their innovation agenda.”

In addition to the reliability and scale of Microsoft Azure, Avaya CCaaS customers gain access to the power of Nuance’s Contact Center AI technology integrated with OneCloud. Nuance is a Microsoft company. The combined capabilities of Microsoft and Nuance give Avaya customers flexibility to create and deliver intelligent, personalized and impactful consumer interactions with long-term investment protection and control of their data, the companies said.

This news builds on Avaya’s longstanding relationship with Microsoft. Together Avaya, Microsoft and Nuance provide true integration. This spans not just the contact center application itself but also the underlying communication platforms.

Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers have increased customer insight via CRM data maintained within Dynamics 365. They benefit from Microsoft’s powerful AI capabilities via Azure Cognitive Services. Later this year, Avaya expects to further expand OneCloud CCaaS capabilities with Microsoft Teams integration. This allows customers to more broadly use the expertise and knowledge of their entire organization in servicing customers via the contact center.