Avaya Wraps Spoken Buy to Ramp Up Cloud-Based Services

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from February.**

Avaya has completed its acquisition of Spoken Communications, a provider of enterprise contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offerings.

The acquisition was announced in January at Avaya’s annual Engage conference. The Spoken platform accelerates Avaya’s growth in cloud-based services and provides a cloud platform for customers of all sizes.

Avaya’s Jim Chirico

“This acquisition is the latest example of how Avaya is now moving at cloud speed and investing for the future to provide our customers and partners with the innovative cloud solutions they need,” said Jim Chirico, Avaya’s president and CEO. “We welcome the members of the Spoken team to the Avaya family, and look forward to building great success together.”

Spoken Conversation Center, Spoken’s CCaaS, provides a set of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled conversational services from a globally available, cloud-first platform that contact centers use to analyze, learn from and respond to customer conversations. Spoken’s cloud-native, multitenant architecture is integrated with Avaya Aura and Elite technologies. As a result, it also provides an architecture for both Avaya’s omnichannel offerings, such as Oceana, and it’s UCaaS.

Avaya said Spoken brings a “transformative platform” with many built-in features that today require third-party tools. This model will make it easier for customers and partners to do business with Avaya, it said.

With more than 170 patents and patent applications, Spoken’s intellectual property will accelerate Avaya’s move into big data, machine learning and AI.

At Engage, Mohamad Afshar, Spoken’s president and CEO, said Avaya and Spoken can “deliver a compelling, cloud-native CCaaS portfolio for Avaya customers that offers every customer, from small and midmarket businesses to global enterprises, a seamless path to a modern cloud-based contact center.”

In December, Avaya emerged from chapter 11 bankruptcy with about $350 million in cash and a little less than half of the debt it had when it filed in January of 2017.