Avaya AI, RingCentral Partnership Expansion Shine at Engage

AVAYA ENGAGE 2024 — Unified communications giant Avaya at Engage, its customer experience and partner event, on Tuesday unleashed a flurry of updates to its contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offer, the Avaya Experience Platform (AXP).

The company, which focuses much of its efforts on customer journeys, last week said it would up its artificial intelligence (AI) game once more, acquiring AI orchestration firm Edify. 

The unified communications firm also recently forged a partnership with conferencing giant Zoom, launching a joint offer that brings AI capabilities into the meetings, chat, scheduling and Zoom's whiteboard experience — along with lending users access to Zoom AI Companion, a generative AI digital assistant.

Avaya at the event in Denver shared that its updated CCaaS platform will include integration with automated customer interaction platform LivePerson and will feature the framework that will enable businesses to choose where they integrate the digital assistant. 

Avaya AI Push

One of Avaya's central criticisms has been a failure to contemporize, but under the near two-year leadership of CEO Alan Masarek, the company appears to be doing just that, hoping to get more Avaya AI into the hands of customers.

Last year, Masarek told Channel Futures he hoped to change how people view Avaya. One way was to accelerate the company's product development, he told us. Masarek even acknowledged, during that interview, that in the past, that Avaya had been “slower to product development,” adding that “the world [was] reduced to a bumper sticker: ‘[on-premises] bad, cloud good,’ which is just not true.”

Now, at this year's Engage, Avaya and AI appear synonymous, with the addition of various AI-infused features to the AXP. Avaya hopes that "Avaya AI'"will become something its customers − legacy, hybrid and pure cloud − will lean on significantly.

The company released a slew of features from agent-assist to customer-journey orchestration and analytics leveraging Microsoft Power BI and the Microsoft Copilot tool, which is gaining a lot of traction as an AI assistant. 

Avaya AI also got a boost with the intro of workforce engagement tools in the form of native integration with workforce management tool Calabrio.

The UC giant further launched a new health care experience with Epic Systems, which it says it designed to optimize health-care workflows, enabling staff to deliver superior patient services with more efficiency and better coordination.

Avaya Concentrating on Reducing Carbon Footprint 

Avaya says it will focus efforts on reducing its carbon footprint with the launch of AXP Private Cloud, Extended Scale, an offer it calls “a robust solution designed to meet the needs of its largest AXP on-prem customers."

“This new offering enhances performance and capacity, allowing for a dramatic simplification and consolidation of infrastructure,” the company said. “It delivers a substantial reduction in infrastructure footprint while ensuring 100% call survivability across actively separated sites.” 

Avaya, RingCentral Team Up Once More 

On Monday, Avaya and RingCentral expanded their strategic partnership that's been in place since 2019. That's when the two came together to bring Avaya Cloud Office − a WebRTC communications system with enterprise-grade voice, video, IM/messaging, meetings, conferencing and collaboration tools − to market.

"No one company is doing all the innovation in a one-stop-shop," Masarek said during his Tuesday morning keynote, focusing on the importance of working with others.

Its latest offer is a hybrid solution that allows users within the same organization to collaborate no matter the system they use, be it Avaya Aura or Avaya Cloud Office telephony solutions. 

"Customers gain additional value from their existing investments in Avaya’s solutions by combining them with RingCentral’s video calling and messaging features, including RingSense AI —RingCentral’s core AI platform," the company said.