Masergy, Avaya, Vonage, Others Tout Innovations at Enterprise Connect

Masergy, Avaya and Vonage are among channel companies unveiling new products and services at this week’s Enterprise Connect 2019 conference in Orlando.

Masergy launched a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual agent. Masergy Intelligent Virtual Agent powers virtual assistant and chatbot features for the company’s global UCaaS offerings. It also serves as the queueing agent for its cloud contact center platform.

When coupled with Masergy’s predictive analytics and machine-learning capabilities, the Intelligent Virtual Agent aims to help users increase productivity, reduce customer service times and improve customer satisfaction scores.

Masergy’s Bob Laskey

Bob Laskey, Masergy’s chief revenue officer, tells Channel Partners the new service will create new opportunities for channel partners who want to align what they offer with the priorities of chief information officers.

“Channel partners will benefit from the up-sell revenue gained from existing customers as well as new revenue streams from prospective customers,” he said.

In addition, Cisco has selected Masergy as a global premier partner for its Customer Journey Platform. Key benefits for partners include: the ability to capture new revenue opportunities; delivering a future-proof UC road map with frictionless migration strategies to their existing client bases; and white-glove service delivery with around-the-clock support for their clients.

“Masergy’s global premier partner designation from Cisco is a testament to the success we have had in successfully migrating enterprise customers from legacy UC and contact-center solutions to Cisco’s omnichannel Customer Journey Platform,” Laskey said. “A lot of these migrations are often very complex and partnering with Masergy provides channel partners with the unique advantage of dedicated project management resources, product training, and engineering for all CCaaS implementations. To meet growing customer demand, Masergy is expanding its business unit focused on CCaaS and adding critical channel sales, solution engineering and software resources.

Also Tuesday, Avaya announced further integration with Google Cloud Contact Center AI. It’s designed to provide better experiences for customers and a more efficient workforce, taking advantage of both companies’ artificial-intelligence capabilities. This includes embedding Google’s machine learning within Avaya conversation services powering the contact center, enabling integration of AI capabilities regardless of channel, promoting a consistent and intelligent experience for customers, and delivering true omnichannel experiences with AI, the company said.

Avaya’s Eric Rossman

Eric Rossman, Avaya’s vice president of partners, developers and alliances, tells Channel Partners the integration will benefit Avaya’s partners by reducing complexity in contact center operations while “dramatically improving” customer experiences.

“Avaya believes that this integration can definitely offer its partners and customers a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” he said. “The modular design leveraged in architecting key components of both companies’ technologies will afford customers flexibility in adapting and evolving to suit their needs over time, even in heterogenous equipment environments. Lastly, we feel that Avaya’s conversation services will also offer distinct advantages to users.”

Vonage got in the act at Enterprise Connect, debuting Number Programmability on its Vonage Business (VBC) Cloud platform, which combines …

… UC and communications APIs to customize the business communications experience.

The Number Programmability service enables any VBC phone number to be programmatically routed to a host of API-driven capabilities, allowing enterprises to customize their communications system to meet their own unique business needs – with just a few lines of code – and bringing increased capabilities to the newly launched CX Cloud Express contact-center package.

“Communications is at the core of a business’ digital transformation,” said Jay Patel, Vonage‘s senior vice president of product management. “Most companies focus on innovation to move their businesses forward and digital-transformation initiatives often lead the way. To meet the growing need for tools that fuel digital transformation, Vonage Number Programmability provides enterprises with unprecedented capabilities to customize their business communications applications with common web technologies.”

Also at Enterprise Connect: