In August 2021, a mere 8 months ago, Avaya launched a strategic relationship aimed to integrate Avaya’s OneCloud™ into Microsoft Azure, the software giant’s cloud computing platform. On Tuesday of this week, the two companies announced an expansion of their joint development efforts aimed to simplify and accelerate the transition of enterprises employing Avaya’s premises based Contact Centers and Unified Communications solutions (aka OneCloud) into Microsoft’s public cloud (aka Azure).

If you think this sounds like the same announcement, you are not alone. It is best characterized as an extension of the August 2021 announcement. Yet there are some salient differences. The May 2022 announcement speaks of the addition of Avaya OneCloud CCaaS and CPaaS to the Azure Marketplace where they appear at the top of the list in alphabetical order. So there is an effort to make OneCloud “easy to buy”.

In addition, Microsoft’s has officially completed its acquisition of of Nuance Communications, a long-time provider of automated speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine learning and biometric authentication to enterprise contact centers. Visions of a well integrated offering that integrates the collective resources of Microsoft and Nuance to help companies build trusted, intelligent virtual assistants could be an interesting enticement.

It’s clear that, since August 2021, the Microsoft-Avaya relationship has met with a certain amount of success as they migrate Avaya’s huge base of on-premises customers onto Azure. After all, “multi-cloud” has become a shibboleth for companies that feel the necessity to move to the cloud, but show disdain for being locked into a single vendor, meaning AWS, when they move customer care-oriented IT infrastructure to public clouds.

Signal Moment for the Conversational Cloud

Opus Research joins the long-standing chorus of analysts advising Enterprises decision makers to choose solution providers on a “fit for purpose” basis. That means they should procure and deploy solutions capable of meeting specific objectives or service levels when they redirect spending from investment in on-premises IT infrastructure into their choice of cloud-based XaaS offerings.

Instead of parsing their worlds into CCaaS, UCaaS or CPaaS, it’s time to of take a holistic, purpose-driven view on cloud-based expenditures. The troika of Microsoft, Avaya and Nuance looks like an excellent candidate to compete for share of market in the world of the Conversational Cloud.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants