Avaya Chapter 22 - a reflection..

As 亚美亚公司 enters Chapter 11 for a second time, I wanted to share my thoughts and background how I have seen 亚美亚公司 evolve over the years and the current state of play. The convergence of cloud is here, in fact I believe we are at the twilight of voice as we know it.

Given this, why do Avaya end user customer purists still push the on premise approach given its 2023 and voice is now evolving into simply being another channel of communication?

Background

亚美亚公司 had more than humble beginnings, it started as Western Electric being the main supplier to Bell System ( AT&T ) from 1881. So this is the Goliath of the Enterprise Communications market.

The majority of the fortune 100 companies used Avaya as their "ACD" (Automatic Call Distribution) platform and that evolved as the Contact Center platform of choice. I vividly remember being in 北电网络 's offices in New Delhi in early December of 2009 when the announcement that Avaya will acquire Nortel. All our jaws dropped and many were excited for "Avaya Blue" but the reality is (in my opinion), that was the beginning of the end of the journey for Avaya. Since December 2009, the purists have continued to use Avaya as it brought the promise of number 1 in stability and reliability with the benefits of being on premise.

Given the emergency of UC Platforms such as BroadSoft as one of the early adaptors to IP Telephony, it took time for full featured Contact Center to evolve. However, IP Telephony since 2009 has rapidly become mature to the point that IP Telephony has now become the standard and customers using legacy platforms such as 亚美亚公司 CM or 思科 CUCM have rapidly replacing these platforms for Zoom Phone, 微软 Teams, 8x8 , RingCentral and the like.

The current play

However, this comes to the main issue of 亚美亚公司 and legacy on Prem. Prior to the pandemic, we made an unsolicited offer to Avaya in the Philippines to host Avaya IP Office in our private cloud located in Makati, Philippines. However, the issue was we were seen that we would eat into Avaya's legacy maintenance revenue.

Avaya's reliance on legacy and not paying attention to the cloud hurt them. This saw them create a late entry to the cloud game in partnership with RingCentral which in short was doomed from the start. Avaya to resell someone else's platform when they had the opportunity to migrate Avaya Aura Communications Manager to the cloud.

By this time, here at ULAP we had developed our own SBC and then the lightbulb moment turned on. What if we offer a Session Border Controller as a Service (SBCaaS)? Then we took that further, how do we offer SBCaaS in a customers private cloud and connect it to public cloud UC/CCaaS platforms? Then one step further how do we offer multi-cloud offering real-time?

What is the point of all of this? Many Avaya customers go we must have 100% up time. So that made me think of a banking customer who has recently asked us to develop a 100% guaranteed uptime solution to work with their Contact Center as a Service platform (CCaaS).

We were thrown the challenge. We looked at both traditional ISDN Primary Rate services and SIP and all the failure points and this is where the purists think they win. SIP technology has evolved that voice paths can continue even if one set of infra fails. It is very complex and we have done it. Based on this, here at ULAP we have also routed real time to 2 different platforms at the same time. This means we can do round robin to 2 completely different platforms. Of course first reaction is the why? but as Tim Shaw said, wait there's more. The steak knifes. If you correctly integrate your Contact Center into your CRM platform such as Salesforce Service Cloud as an example, the Contact Center platform is now irrelevant. All reporting will be done out of Salesforce. This means FCR, ACP, RTA etc call all be reported out of the CRM platform. Also, the other channels of communication can also be measured in conjunction with voice.

ULAP being both a network operator and a UC Vendor, that put us into a position of how we look at things overall. It was not simply connecting PSTN to a cloud provider. What about interconnects? What about iBGP and eBGP connections? How about peering? What is the resiliency over submarine cables between geographically dispersed points of presences. The list goes on. Also, there is the integration to incumbent telco's. Establishing HA, round robin, the list is quite long.

I recently had a chuckle when I heard a partner describe to me that they have no physical points of presences and here I was thinking, for the resiliency required to meet the needs of the 亚美亚公司 customer base a pure virtual environment will not work. How about highly regulated jurisdictions where they only use Primary Rate ISDN circuits to the premises? There are so many facets needed in providing 100% uptime that need to be factored. However, the 亚美亚公司 on prem did historically win. But now, hybrid cloud has taken over and won. Mixing legacy with cloud private and public can achieve the holy grail and replace that legacy on premise.

Conclusion

People can agree to disagree with me, however, this is the time for the 亚美亚公司 install base to finally move from on-premise to the hybrid cloud. You have to let go that the contact center manager is the longer one in charge, it is now your CRM where all your other channels of communication end up. Voice volumes are dying and customers are sick and tired of complex IVR's. As I tell customers, I was involved in a study worth over $500K some years ago and customers want their phone calls to be answered in 20 seconds and their matter dealt with in 400 seconds. That's it. That simplistic view means that you can use any off the shelf cloud platform out there. Saving you big. All the complexity can be built at the CRM level where the analytics is really needed.

What's next?

Contact ULAP . Before you make any decision on your cloud strategy, let us educate you on how to have total control of your telco. This is the first step in having a strategy in moving to the hybrid cloud. Once we have prepared your back end, you can choose any UC / CC platform of your choice and even mix and match.

Please feel free to call me on +1-888-504-ULAP (press option 8 for me) or feel free to PM me here on LinkedIn to learn more.