Blog

What It Takes to Be a Technology Leader in an Evolving Digital World

02/07/2019, Written by 0 comment

The definition of a leader varies greatly, especially in business. From my perspective a leader is defined by their ability to pivot and adapt to the evolution of a market. Like many companies today, Avaya, its customers and partners are riding the often daunting—yet consistently exciting—wave of digital transformation of the enterprise. As a technology leader, Avaya is not only pivoting and adapting to this new environment for itself, but pivoting and adapting our services and solutions to enable its customers and partners to thrive during their own transformations.

Unlike many of our competitors, digital transformation is something we saw coming years ago. We recognized right away that it wasn’t a passing fad but something that could truly transform how business gets done, with communications playing the most important role. We knew that for us to be successful, we would need to focus on transforming ourselves first so that our customers and partners could learn and benefit from our experiences, our lessons learned. During our own transformation, we gained that extra insight that we were able to leverage in the development of truly transformational solutions and services.

As we drove our own multi-year transformation, we also maintained our global market share leadership position in Contact Center. According to Canalys research, we hold more than 34% of the market, which is almost greater than the No. 2 and No. 3 competitors combined. No technology leader gets to claim this size of market share without making its customers a priority.

Last month for example, we hosted a private event in New York as part of our Future of Communication Experience series. The purpose was to update and inform specially invited customers about our portfolio roadmap and vision. We encouraged them to come with questions and to be prepared to have real, in-depth conversations about the challenges they’re facing during their own transformations. As always, it was a great experience for the customers and Avayans in attendance. Overall, customers from world-leading payment brands, to high-end retail chains, to players in the automotive industry said that they are very optimistic, confident and excited about what we have to offer today and what we have planned for the future. And next month we will be in Mexico City for our twelfth consecutive year with 3,000 Avaya customers and partners from all over the Americas. This is the largest customer and partner event we do all year.

In particular, two of the solutions our customers are most excited about are Avaya Oceana™ omnichannel contact center and Avaya Breeze™ development platform. These same solutions were recently touted as visionary by a global analyst firm as part of its latest Magic Quadrant ranking.

Avaya Oceana, which was launched last year, adds advanced multi-channel functionality to our own contact center solutions, such as Avaya Aura® Call Center Elite voice platform and Avaya Aura® Contact Center. It also integrates with third-party automatic call distribution solutions, as well as offering advanced reporting and customer journey mapping capabilities through Avaya Oceanalytics™ insights. Specifically, we have been told by analysts that Oceana’s new approach to routing—which is attribute matching so that it includes data consideration and customer journey mapping—is something our competitors simply can’t offer.

The Avaya Breeze platform, which Avaya Oceana was built upon, enables users to be flexible when responding to the ever-evolving digital marketplace. It has garnered industry recognition for its ability to enable developers to quickly create unique communications-enabled contact center applications and workflows for within and beyond the enterprise—with little or no development required and nearly instant deployment. We are seeing customers use Avaya Breeze to create unique applications tailored to their specific business and communications needs.

According to Irwin Lazar, Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, “More than half of the companies are using or planning to use APIs to embed communications capabilities into their apps, while another 25% are looking at using them to build custom apps. Platforms like Avaya Breeze offer organizations the ability to deliver enhanced business value and execute on their digital strategies by integrating communications and collaboration into workflows, business processes and existing applications.”

These solutions are just the tip of the iceberg for Avaya. We are a long-standing industry standard with a significant global footprint. We are focused on continuing to expand and develop our solutions to meet the needs of our growing global customer base, with more than 5,400 patents awarded and pending, including foreign counterparts.

Our strong service provider and system integration partnerships around the world enable us to meet the needs of a wide variety of organizations, both large and midsize. We’ve received industry recognition for our strong Contact Center integration solutions.

Our continued strength in the industry is evident by our 300,000 customers worldwide. In fact, the top 10 largest banks worldwide are running Avaya solutions and 90% of Fortune 100 companies are Avaya customers.

At Avaya, we are re-imagining the industry, bringing visionary products and solutions to market, and enabling our customers to digitally transform their businesses with ease. I am excited and proud of our ability to continue to evolve, pivot and adapt to the changing business communications world. After all, that is the responsibility of a leader.

Read more