Avaya Engage 2019 – which attracted over 2,600 users partners, executives and analysts – is in the books. This year featured an upbeat vision for existing customers, partners and integrators to migrate significant amounts of their communications resources to new cloud-based services, and to enhance them with elements of artificial intelligence (AI). In support of those goals, Avaya initiated rapid-fire renaming of all the classic premises- and cloud-based offerings – including Oceana, Zang, Spaces and Aura – as part of its Intelligent Experience (IX) initiatve while simultaneously placing cloud-based initiatives under the uber-brand OneCloud. To expedite and simplify migration to OneCloud, Avaya created a speedy engagement model ReadyNow to provide incentive for existing clients to pursue new architectures for both Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

Announcing the Avaya IX Portfolio

While it can be confused with the Roman numeral for “9”, Avaya IX is designed to better compete with the new generation of CPaaS providers like Amazon, Twilio, Google and Vonage, as well as the classic cloud-based offerings of Genesys, NICE/InContact, Five9, and others. The roster of CCaaS companies has exploded in the last few years and Avaya now finds companies like RingCentral, Zoho, 8×8, Talkdesk and a few dozen others. In the UC category, it offers Avaya IX Digital Workplace which subsumes the classic nomenclature of IP Office, Aura, Equinox and Zang Spaces. It also includes some impressive intelligent end-points, featuring J Series phones, Vantage terminals and video endpoints like Scopia.

More relevant to the topic of Intelligent Assistance and Bots are Avaya’s plans for revamping its Digital Contact Center. The Voice components still include Aura Contact Center, Avaya Call Center Elite and the Avaya Experience Portal for IVR. Omnichannel support is through Oceana and Breeze and agent desktop and productivity supported by Avaya’s Workspaces and Workforce Optimization. But everything has been repackaged to support the OneCloud branding, ReadyNow accelerators and the IX approach.

Aside from its brand, reputation, services organization and network of go-to-market partners (5,000+ in total), Avaya made clear that it will distinguish itself by a commitment to innovation. Recent hires and the return of several key executives give Avaya a deep bench of experienced managers to propel product development and delivery at the speed of cloud-native solutions providers.

Avaya IX Mobility Can Be a Big Differentiator

Thanks to a legacy of innovation dating back over 100 years to Bell Labs, the company has deep understanding of elements of “AI” that are particularly relevant to both Intelligent Assistance and Intelligent Authentication. These include natural language processing, self-sovereign ID management and distributed ledgers (aka blockchain). Services built on these components are being developed under the Avaya IX Mobility umbrella by the Innovation Group that reports to Laurent Philonenko.

Under the Avaya Mobile Experience brand, the company was already offering two services that lay the foundation for personalized, secure communications over smartphones:

• Call deflection to digital: provides in-network, pre-treatment of dialed numbers (details to come) taking into account location and other attributes. It has proven to be a vitally important enabler of enhanced 911 emergency calls.
• Identity Management: lays the foundation for continuous user authentication that can support consistent, secure, personalized omnichannel services.

Watch this space. In particular, as brands become more aware of the importance of rapid identification and authentication of individual callers and using intelligence in the network to route, redirect or otherwise deflect calls to the proper individual or resource, they’ll find these core capabilities are already baked into the Avaya IX Mobility platform.

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