Emerging stronger than ever as a company – my experience with Avaya

After last week’s fantastic announcement from the US court that Avaya has the green light to exit Chapter 11, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experience with the company and look back at our people, customers and partners. First of all, I have to say the news is truly exciting as we’re going to re-enter the market as a public company, while reducing our debts to more than half. We now have more opportunities than ever before to further drive innovation and to increase our R&D spending.

Innovation has always been central to my experience at Avaya. When I initially joined Avaya on January 1st, 1994, the name of the company was AT&T GBCS, then we were in BCS in Lucent Technologies and we became Avaya at the turn of the millenium. But I can proudly say whatever name we have gone by, our company was the best company in the industry because of some fundamental strengths that we’ve had and always kept. Firstly, we have always created a culture of true teamwork and respect for each other. Secondly, there was a passion for technology, innovation and creating compelling solutions for our customers. Let me comment on these two points as we prepare to leave Chapter 11.

Culture

Throughout the years, Avaya’s people have always made  a difference. We  worked literally day and night to grow our business. Every Avaya employee was able to tell the story and not only did we have a true passion for winning and did we fundamentally understand customer requirements, we could translate these requirements into tangible solutions and we did it together as a team. We had the best people in the industry and only the result as a team mattered.

Besides working hard, we also ‘played hard’. Alongside creating advanced and innovative solutions, colleagues even created bands. An amazing example was the band “Robin and the Vectors” named after our call center routing user interface. The band was an instant success of which 3 CD’s appeared of songs about our customers and sales channels. Amazing times! That type of team spirit applied across the globe.  We weren’t just colleagues, we were friends, and many co-workers even found their loved ones within the company. I’m proud to say that a few years ago, Forbes ranked Avaya as #10 in a Happiest Employees list.  

Of course, we’ve gone through tough times more recently. Since we voluntarily filed Chapter 11, our competitors have aggressively targeted our customer and partner base – and made plenty of negative or false statements in doing so. For Avaya insiders, the truth was simple: Chapter 11 was about a balance sheet issue that needed to be fixed as a result of the ‘Leveraged Buy Out’, nothing else. Our P&L has always been strong. What we did as Avaya and as a team was to believe in ourselves and to play to our strengths, without descending to our competitors’ level. We played the game that we believed in and that has ultimately led to success – for us, our partners and for our customers. What was amazing was that our customers and partners stood by us and continued to believe in us – giving us the enormous strength and energy we needed to continue our journey.

Now that we are ready to exit Chapter 11, I have to say that all those hours working with customers, partners and employees have been extremely rewarding. We were all counting on each other and helped each other out: the team spirit is stronger than ever.

Technology

Our Technology has always been second to none. The first time, I visited the R&D department at Bell Labs - linked to what is now Avaya – it made a deep and ever-lasting impact on me. We invented CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) for example. In the early 1990’s, we had a capability called CallVisor ASAI (and later TSAPI), wich enabled a computer to control and to monitor our flagship switching product Definity. No company in the industry had the ability to create compelling routing algorithms or to come up with interesting use-cases for our customers. The four years I have worked at our Avaya Headquarters in the US, it gave me an opportunity to understand the strengths of our technology as we worked together to expand the business globally. In 1999, we celebrated our first milestone of generating $1 billion in none-US revenue. A lot of innovation was driven internationally and we continued to add powerful capabilities to our products to create a worldclass portfolio in the areas of customer engagement and team engagement. Over the last years we have released many products solutions to enable customers to communicate and interact in new and compelling ways, securely and simply.

I attended GITEX Technology Week in Dubai recently, and it was truly remarkable to see just how far we have come ahead of the market – thanks to that remarkable teamwork, and alignment between our teams, partners and customers. We had live demo’s of blockchain technology for example to measure customer sentiment or we had our customers themselves demonstrating what omni-channel meant.

Now that we’re approaching the holiday season, I’d like to thank our customers and partners  who have stood by us, and wish everyone Season’s Greetings. I look forward to the New Year, and working with you all in continuing to build a company that is truly customer-led, focused on excellent execution and innovative technology. Thank You.