Avaya Market Momentum Continues, Looks Ahead to Annual Customer Conference

Avaya, a global leader in customer experience and communications solutions, outlined continued business momentum, innovation, and industry leadership in the recent quarter as the company and its extended partner ecosystem work closely with customers to help their organizations accelerate and grow. Avaya made the announcement as it prepares for a Global Industry Analyst Summit this week in La Jolla, CA, and then its largest global customer conference — Avaya ENGAGE 2024 — scheduled for May 13-15 in Denver, CO.

Over the last quarter, Avaya accelerated its momentum as the company showcased how enterprises can leverage AI-powered innovation on top of existing systems to deliver customer experiences that drive better business performance. The momentum resulted from various strategic decisions, including the announcement of a simplified portfolio and solutions architecture, new strategic partnerships, industry and analyst event presence, new executive appointments, and more.

“Avaya’s upward momentum reflects our core differentiator as we deliver on the promise of ‘innovation without disruption’ — a strategy that helps enterprise customers avoid the serious business repercussions that can come from ‘rip and replace’ upgrades of entire systems,” said Alan Masarek, CEO, Avaya. “Avaya’s innovation without disruption strategy is adding tangible value for enterprises, giving these organizations the unmatched ability to add AI and other innovations on top of existing investments, keeping their business moving with speed and quality with Avaya’s solutions, services, and world-class ecosystem. We are excited about the possibilities we are exploring with customers, as we continue to break ground on new opportunities to empower our customers with improved customer and employee experiences that drive better business growth and outcomes.”

Avaya Business Performance Continues to Build on Strong Momentum

Avaya’s market momentum includes continued strong business performance that builds on the company’s successful financial transformation in 2023. With the financial restructuring behind it, the company is levered free cash flow positive, excluding one-time items, and retains a strong balance sheet with <1x net leverage[1].

This solid financial position has provided more than sufficient liquidity to execute the strategic plan and continued reinvestment in the business as the company exited the calendar year with ~$650M of cash, and access to a further $128M in a revolving facility. Avaya successfully delivered on its revenue plan for the past five quarters (across FY23 and Q1 FY24) and is on track to exceed planned revenue for the first half of FY24. Avaya said its core value proposition — ‘innovation without disruption’ — continues to resonate exceedingly well with customers, with net logo retention among large enterprise customers at 97% and renewal rates on base subscription contracts ahead of plan.  

Delivering for Customers

Avaya highlighted how, over the recent months, it has successfully supported customers to help them succeed in their unique markets:

• One of the world’s leading insurance companies, Aflac, in a key session at Gartner Symposium, outlined how it leverages Avaya’s solutions and technology to carefully balance technology and a personal touch in its contact centers to provide empathy and build customer connections, while supporting its customer service agents to deliver more relational experiences.

• United Tractors, a subsidiary of Indonesian industry conglomerate Astra, recently implemented Avaya Experience Platform™ (newly renamed AXP Public Cloud) in partnership with Arunika Digital Prakarsa to support its business goals of deepening customer engagement and customer service that creates long-term value. Migrating from a contact center solution that caused time-inefficient customer interactions, AXP Public Cloud has helped United Tractors deliver highly personalized customer experiences across its voice channels. “Avaya’s focus on customer engagement really resonated with our needs as we found a scalable solution that helped us to transform our voice-based customer service,” said Andrie Permadi Permana, Head of Customer Contact and Command Center at United Tractors. “Thanks to AXP’s advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, we could identify customer pain points and address them much more quickly, while helping to rationalize our spending and resource allocation.”

• Goodwill is a household name in the US with more than 4,200 retail stores nationwide. Avaya and partner TCT Technologies worked together to help Goodwill Michiana significantly reduce communication system spending with a smooth transition to the cloud to support remote working, business continuity, and modernization. Thanks to this partnership, over 17,000 people were served by Goodwill Industries of Michiana in 2023.

Innovation and Strategic Partnerships that Deliver Customer Experiences and Collaboration

The company’s momentum was recently showcased through several announcements at a leading industry trade show, Enterprise Connect, where Avaya announced a strategic partnership for AI-powered collaboration with Zoom and streamlined its solutions portfolio into a single product suite for Unified Communications and Collaboration, and a single platform offering for Customer Experience.

Enterprise Connect was preceded by a similar event – ITEXPO – where CEO Alan Masarek delivered a keynote address highlighting key CX trends. In addition, a steady stream of customer and partner announcements, along with positive industry analyst recognition, executive additions, and continued financial performance have underpinned the company’s continued acceleration.

Today’s enterprise customers must continually address rising customer expectations, the difficulty of attracting and retaining employees in a competitive market, and the unrelenting pressure to drive business growth. To address these customer challenges, Avaya’s solutions drive significant improvements in Enterprise CX, by optimizing both Customer Experience and Employee Experience to deliver Business outcomes.  

To enable this, Avaya simplified its portfolio and solutions architecture to help its customers to adopt new capabilities that meaningfully improve customer experience, employee experience, and business outcomes. Avaya announced their enhanced and redefined Avaya Experience Platform™ (AXP) as a single, unified platform that encompasses Avaya solutions for customer experience (CX). The move enables Avaya to accelerate roadmap delivery, and makes it easier for Enterprise customers to innovate without disruption, deliver exceptional experiences to their customers and employees, and drive measurable business growth. AXP lets customers choose their solution deployment path, whether on-prem, private cloud, public cloud, or often a hybrid deployment combination.

The company also announced the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite, a suite of solutions that delivers seamless communication and collaboration experiences and can connect with people and tools — all in one place to meet, call, chat, share files, manage tasks, and more. The suite is unique in the industry as it lets organizations choose their solution deployment path for themselves across on-prem, private cloud, or public cloud.

Avaya now offers a hybrid deployment option that integrates with video collaboration solutions. Customers can enable their employees to access existing Avaya telephony from within the leading collaboration platform of their choice. Avaya announced a new partnership and native integration with Zoom’s AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace. The Zoom Workplace native integration will be available for Avaya Aura or Avaya Enterprise Cloud customers, providing a new streamlined way to manage their communications environments and workflows. Microsoft Teams Integration is also available for all solutions in the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite.

Strong Affirmation from Leading Industry Analysts

The world’s largest public and private enterprises trust Avaya to deliver customer and collaboration experiences that help them differentiate, accelerate, and grow and to enable them to meet the needs of their customers. Industry analysts agree that Avaya innovations are driving forward the customer experience and collaboration industry market segments:

• Recently, Avaya was named in The Aragon Research Globe™ for Intelligent Contact Centers (ICC) 2024, for the Avaya Experience Platform. The recognition reflects how Avaya Experience Platform is transforming the contact center with AI-powered virtual agents that are enhancing the customer experience “Avaya’s multi-cloud approach, reinvigorated leadership team, and refreshed products make the company one to watch,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and Founder, Aragon Research. “Contact centers have expanded beyond just communication hubs for customer and company interactions – they have transformed into cost centers and experience centers too, thanks to generative AI and its enablement of better, more considerate customer experiences.”

• In response to Avaya’s portfolio announcement and strategic collaboration platform partnership with Zoom, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, said: “Avaya’s launch of the Communication and Collaboration Suite reflects a significant step forward for the company. The reimagined, market-leading solutions from Avaya and their strategic partners clearly deliver on the promise of innovation without disruption. The Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite brings new levels of integration to employees who spend hours a day on video calls, often across multiple collaboration solutions. By streamlining their UC offerings into a single suite, Avaya not only addresses the evolving demands of customers and their employees but also offers a unique solution to simplify the complex digital workspace. This consolidation redefines how organizations foster collaboration, ensuring seamless interaction across diverse collaboration solutions and enhancing productivity in the virtual workplace.”

Critical Talent Continues to Choose Avaya

In addition to product innovation and customer success, Avaya’s momentum is also demonstrated by continued success in recruiting experienced leaders to the company. Over the past quarter, many additional executives joined Avaya’s leadership team, including: Soren Abildgaard as Chief Technology Officer, Al Morales as Chief Transformation Officer, and Marylou “ML” Maco as Chief Revenue and Customer Experience Officer. A continually strengthened leadership team reflects Avaya as a company on the move, a destination place to work, and one that can attract world-class talent, the company said.

Avaya ENGAGE to Showcase the Customer Experience Journey

Avaya now looks ahead to Avaya ENGAGE 2024, which will be held in Denver, CO on May 13-15, and is the must-attend CX event for 2024. Avaya executives, partners, and customers will highlight how they are shaping their CX and communications journeys through informative breakout sessions and hands-on labs. Key topic areas across the agenda include: how to adopt a digital-first experience powered by AI for people engagement; identifying and filling gaps in CX fluency; how organizations can look at data and network security as a competitive advantage; how a vibrant partner ecosystem can help companies shape their CX journey with Avaya; and examining how employee experience can be the secret to creating the best CX.

The mainstage host for Avaya ENGAGE again this year is technology expert and Emmy Award-winning TV personality Katie Linendoll. The event boasts keynote sessions from speakers including: Arianna Huffington (founder and CEO of Thrive Global, founder of The Huffington Post, and the author of 15 books), Ayanna Howard, PhD (innovator, entrepreneur, leader, and international expert in robotics and AI, and Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University and Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair), R “Ray” Wang (Founder and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research), Alan Masarek (CEO, Avaya), Lori Wodrich (President, IAUG), Soren Abildgaard (CTO, Avaya), and more.

Avaya ENGAGE 2024 will also feature the winners’ ceremony for the inaugural CX Force Awards. Founded by Avaya in partnership with IAUG and sponsored by Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, the new awards program is designed to spotlight and celebrate the innovators, strategists, and pioneers dedicated to reshaping the world of customer experience.

Preceding Avaya ENGAGE, Avaya is hosting an exclusive analyst event on April 16-18, where top analysts will meet with Avaya executives for discussions around Avaya’s roadmap and vision.