In this interview with Mr Nidal Abou-Ltaif, President of Avaya International, we discuss his company’s achievements over the course of 2018, and its plans for the New Year. He also opens up on Avaya’s desire to help its clients adapt to new technologies such as AI, mobility and cloud.
* As Avaya heads into the New Year, could you give us an idea of how the company’s 2018 was?
– Our fiscal year for 2018 ended in October, and the results were very positive. We began to focus on a number of key areas that are central to our strategy going forward. For example, we’re engaging with our key clients in a highly consultative way to help them better leverage their communications investment. This model led to an increase in large, complex projects for our top enterprise clients.
This increase in large projects also led to increases in our agile development business. We help clients develop customized, leading-edge applications that fully integrate into their environment to solve key business problems and take advantage of opportunities.
During fiscal 2018, we also enhanced our product line with 117 new product releases.
Financially speaking, we had a strong finish to the fiscal year – the direct result of accelerating business momentum driven by our forward-facing investment strategy. Our public cloud solutions are gaining traction as we leverage the strong Avaya brand and our enterprise installed base. Additionally, we’re investing in technology that complements our core solutions, including artificial intelligence and mobility. Our foundation is solid and we are well positioned for growth in 2019 and beyond.
* Speaking of 2019 – what are your key areas of focus for the coming year?
– We aim to build on our industry leadership and grow our business by helping customers grapple with the big technological trends of the day. We have and continue to invest in open communications platforms and ecosystems that serve a broad range of needs. And while we remain committed to protecting and evolving the investments that customers have made in our technology and solutions, we are also responding to the emerging landscape by evolving our market and product approach in three important ways.
Firstly, we have invested in R&D and new technologies to develop and provide more comprehensive Contact Center (CC) and Unified Communications (UC) products and services, continuing our focus on enterprise customers while expanding the value we can provide to mid-market customers.
Secondly, we have evolved our product design philosophy, anticipating demand for applications that are cloud- and mobile-enabled. We design our products to be flexible, extensible, secure and reliable. This approach allows our customers to transition from traditional communications and collaboration technology to newer solutions that are more mobile, manageable and cost-effective.
And finally, we have increased our focus on delivering integrated solutions such as advanced UC, omnichannel CC, and recurring support services.
* You mentioned helping customers grapple with big technological trends – what are some of the big ones that businesses need to be aware of this year?
– We believe several trends are shaping our industry. These trends are creating a big opportunity for vendors such as Avaya, but they’re also good news for the businesses that leverage the new technologies that are driving these trends.
For example, we foresee the convergence of Unified Communications (or enterprise collaboration) with the Contact Center. These technologies are becoming less distinct from each other, and in fact the best solutions deliver integrated services and capabilities across devices and channels. Avaya already has more than 12,000 customers on a converged UC and CC platform, and we are in a position of strength to lead in helping more businesses realize the power of this convergence.
The increasing number of remote workers and the uptick in workforce mobility, with greater use of mobile devices by consumers and employees, continues to be an important trend. This is happening as business leaders shift priorities to digitally transform their companies, taking advantage of disruptive technologies like big data, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.
Of course, there’s an increased preference for the cloud-based delivery of applications, as well as the cloud-based management of multiple and varied devices, all of which must be handled with the security that modern businesses demand.
We also believe that omnichannel communication customer service will continue to rise. As consumers embrace new technologies and devices in creative ways and at an accelerating pace, businesses will need to keep up by delivering a seamless customer experience across every platform.
* Which of these areas is Avaya looking to advance through its innovation?
– We are pursuing advances in Mobility and AI as part of our disruptive innovation strategy. Given their growing importance in contact centers and in the broader communications area, we believe that by taking a leadership position in mobility and AI, we can help our customers thrive under the new realities that the mobile environment has thrust upon them.
The increase in mobile technology has created a world more focused on real-time, flexible and always-on communication. We see companies increasingly looking for ways to make corporate applications and customer information and interactions more accessible via mobile devices as the usage of those devices continues to rise worldwide.
When it comes to AI, we’re building solutions internally and with partners to help organizations transform their customer experiences. For example, we can now offer agent assistance and productivity solutions based on technology we acquired with Intellisist, Inc. (“Spoken”). We’re also offering conversational self-service, based on Avaya’s Ava technology, which integrates with IBM Watson, Google AI, and messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Line, and KakaoTalk.
We can also enable smart routing and behavioral pairing through native integration with our partner, Afiniti, enabling a seamless deployment of enterprise behavioral pairing. This solution helps customers optimize the agent-customer assignment in order to maximize revenue, reduce churn, and deliver other concrete and measurable benefits. We don’t believe there is an equivalent to this solution, which leverages years of our expertise and data modeling.
* Apart from AI and mobility, you also mentioned that cloud will continue to be an important trend in 2019. What is Avaya’s play in that space?
– For customers who want a cloud model, we can offer the Avaya Cloud to deliver some of our solutions and services. With Avaya Cloud, our customers can integrate, customize, and scale operations to be more agile to deliver new products and services to market with always-on resources. We can offer hybrid, private or public cloud-based solutions so that our customers can consume our UC and CC offerings on an as-a-service basis.
With Avaya Hybrid Cloud solutions, for instance, we can provide a migration path between premise-based and cloud-delivered services, so our customers can maximize their on-premise investment, while taking advantage of what the cloud can deliver. And with Avaya Enterprise Cloud and Managed Services, we’ll help install, operate and manage customer cloud solutions based on service agreements that the customer designs. Avaya can provision the equipment stack and even host it on-premise. Our public cloud-based CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) and our UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) solutions, meanwhile, help teams to connect, call, meet and collaborate with others using both Avaya and third-party platforms devices or systems from most locations.
And going forward, our customers will see that we have evolved our product design philosophy, anticipating demand for applications that are cloud- and mobile-enabled. We design our products to be flexible, extensible, secure and reliable. This approach allows our customers to transition from traditional communications and collaboration technology to newer solutions that are more mobile, manageable and cost-effective.
* “We believe that by taking a leadership position in mobility and AI, we can help our customers thrive under the new realities that the mobile environment has thrust upon them.”
