Avaya’s Roadmap: Agile and Innovative, Transparent and Reliable

Avaya and our teams have come a long way in a short period of time. Avaya has reset into a more agile, innovative, and efficient organization that can provide greater value for customers.

This reset has required difficult decisions across our organizations and our portfolio – decisions that are necessary to accelerate our software transformation.

I want to recognize the incredible people at Avaya, both past and present, for their passion and dedication to delivering experiences that matter to our customers, and in turn, to their employees and their customers. This heartfelt belief in what we do is core to our iconic brand and to the future success of our company.

Leading Transformation

I’m honored to lead Avaya through this transformation, and I’m highly confident that our opportunity for future success is indeed outstanding. Every business must work through ups and downs, but when you believe in what you’re doing, you resolve to work through the obstacles and show others why they should, too. I believe leadership means communicating clearly on goals and progress, keeping your promises, and owning up when you make mistakes.

From a personal standpoint, accountability, integrity and transparency are core values I live by in every aspect of life: as a husband, father, grandfather, friend and business leader. Mean what you say, never play the blame game, and model good character. These are sentiments I take very seriously. I believe that having fun at work is important too – you can work really hard, and still have fun, still laugh a lot. This is critical to building a culture in which people believe in the vision, work and grow together, recognize and reward achievements, and retain and attract the best and brightest talent.

I share this to demonstrate my commitment and resolve – promises we make under my leadership will be delivered. We have a plan to deliver the innovation our customers want and need, we will clearly communicate the roadmaps to get there, and you can rely on us to deliver on those milestones with quality.

With that, here are key tenets of Avaya’s plan and commitments to our stakeholders.

We’re Putting Customers at the Center of All We Do

Customers are our reason to be. We only exist because of our customers, so servicing them well, working well with them and working well with one another will always be key to our success. We will listen carefully to the “voice of the customer,” and as such, we will always have an overtly “outside-in” orientation. Our customers’ needs will guide us as we focus our operations and offerings to deliver the innovation customers want and need, with speed and quality.

We Can Help Customers Innovate Without Disruption

Avaya serves businesses of all sizes, but we have a tremendous footprint made up of thousands of the world’s largest enterprises and governments that run our on-premises communication and contact center solutions. Almost all these enterprises are at some stage of a cloud journey, although they need to move at a pace and path that fits their business needs. We hear from many of them that they are not yet ready to move on from the rock solid existing on-premises systems that continue to serve them well…yet they agree that they could benefit greatly from new communications capabilities delivered via the cloud.

It’s crucial that we help these customers adopt innovative new functionality without creating business disruption. For example, many thousands of our customers want to augment voice-only contact center functionality with new digital channels like chat, text and social.

A Clear, Cloud-focused Product Roadmap

As a product person at heart, I’m especially excited about our Avaya product roadmap. Our teams collectively took a step back to determine how we can best give customers the capabilities they need to make the cloud journey at their pace. We prioritized resources based on what customers need most and developed a clear set of milestones and timelines that we can commit to delivering, on time and with quality. What we tell you we’re going to deliver, we’ll deliver.

One common theme throughout our discussions was the need for simplicity. This carried over to our product naming, where we will now take a more straightforward approach. For example, Avaya OneCloud CCaaS will be called the Avaya Experience Platform, representing how it will be our going-forward innovation engine for a converged unified client and contact center platform. Avaya OneCloud Private is now simply known as Avaya Enterprise Cloud, as a nod to its strength with large customers.

Back to roadmaps: we are devoting ever more resources to enhancing The Avaya Experience Platform, which is truly the centerpiece of our cloud strategy. Because the customer experience is no longer limited to interacting with an agent, it increasingly includes employees, so we see UC and the contact center converging to build the best possible experience for all. Our investments here include the set of cloud services we make available for a hybrid environment, such as AI noise removal that can be deployed over the top of existing systems.

We will also keep building out UCaaS capabilities for Avaya Cloud Office to best optimize our customers’ experience.

We will continue to optimize and secure our Avaya Core Software for our traditional systems. And we’ll add to our UC, as well as our device capabilities, including some compatibility with our Avaya Cloud Office ecosystem, and wifi phones so you don't have to worry about cabling.

Bottom line: we are committed to delivering over 300 new features and enhancements in 2023.

Building a Brighter Future

Meeting the needs of our customers as a successful software and support company is our North Star. We are now putting more focused plans behind this overarching objective. Yes, we still have challenges to overcome, but the Avaya team is up to the task.

Every single one of our 90,000 customers globally, from the smallest of start-ups to the very largest enterprises and governments, will have a clear path forward with Avaya. Customer feedback has been integral to our roadmap planning, and what we hear loudest is that customers want to innovate at their pace, to innovate on top of their solid foundations, to innovate without being restricted by architecture, to innovate without writing off investments and experience, to innovate without disruption.

Our customers are our reason to be, and we will build a brighter future for them and with them. I’m excited to communicate our plans and share our progress as we accelerate on our path forward. In the meantime, check out the latest on avaya.com.