Avaya Bankruptcy News, Product Innovations, Partner Reactions, More: A Year In Review

AVAYA ENGAGE — The Avaya bankruptcy news was short-lived this year, and the company isn’t wasting any time moving forward. The cloud and collaboration services provider is holding its annual conference, Avaya Engage. this week in Orlando. Channel Futures is there.

Avaya will showcase product innovations, the company’s channel strategy, its road map for the future of unified communications and customer experience, as well as a primer on the organization’s outlook regarding artificial intelligence. And there’s much more.

This may be an opportunity to revel in a new era, but channel partners are certainly seeking reassurances about the business health of this international company. To grasp what’s ahead necessitates taking an examination of the past. In the slideshow above, we explore the year in that has included financial hurdles, how the company has advanced technologically, and partner and analyst reactions to the Avaya bankruptcy news cycle over the last few months.

In Spite of Avaya Bankruptcy News, It’s a New Era for Product

Avaya’s Alan Masarek

Alan Masarek, Avaya CEO, has said that from a product point of view, Avaya is moving to cloud around its own contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solution.

“We have integration of that with our UC solution. [We work] with [RingCentral] on Avaya Cloud Office, which moves us on the UCaaS side. We’ve got some really attractive assets.”

This includes on-premises. Masarek told Channel Futures in September, prior to its most recent bankruptcy filing, that Avaya had a “history in selling premises-based solutions, our midmarket product, IP Office; our UC product for enterprise, Aura; and our CC product, Elite. We’re unique out there. Where most competitors are all cloud, there are big swaths of customers for which premises makes a great deal of sense.

“So think about certain geographies in the world; we cover 190 countries,” he added. “Think about verticals – health care, critical care, hospitals – and even within geographies or segments, you have governments frequently, or rural areas without great connectivity, things like that, where that premises architecture is critical to them. Then we have companies that want to go immediately to full public multitenancy cloud. The beauty is, most are somewhere in between. Most are sitting there in some sort of hybrid path, particularly when you think of these very large customers that are really the bread and butter of Avaya’s customer base. And we have effectively 90% share among large enterprises, governmental agencies and such globally. So in that world, we can provide a very unique offering, which we call innovation without disruption.

“Finally, [there are] those who want to go immediately to full cloud; we can do that as well in both our public CCaaS solution and our public UCaaS solution — Avaya Cloud Office. That’s where we’re driving. And there’s enormous power, in my view, of being able to manage that cloud transformation on behalf of the customers.”

See our slideshow above for Avaya’s ups and downs from the past year, as well as its ambitions for the future as Avaya Engage gets underway. Then stay with Channel Futures all week for coverage from Engage.