Avaya Enters Strategic Partnership with Microsoft

Raleigh-Durham, NC, Technicalzoo: Avaya (NYSE: AVYA), a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, and Microsoft Corp. have expanded their global partnership by pairing the industry leading Avaya OneCloud™ portfolio with Microsoft Azure to provide organizations with more options to increase their productivity and customer engagement with unrivaled reliability, agility and scale. Building on the success of Avaya OneCloud™ Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure, Avaya is now expanding its partnership to include the Avaya OneCloud portfolio on Azure, for customers that want maximum flexibility to deploy in a hybrid, public or private cloud environment.

“Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is an important milestone in our continued transformation to a cloud business model,” said David Austin, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Alliances, Avaya. “The global scale of Microsoft helps ensure that our joint customers rapidly deploy Avaya OneCloud solutions in any cloud environment of their choice with speed, agility and cost competitiveness. This represents a tremendous opportunity for customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud, and a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to expand our go-to-market reach through the co-selling efforts we have identified with our trusted partner.”

“Many of our largest customers have standardized on Avaya communications solutions, and offering Avaya OneCloud on Microsoft Azure gives them an additional opportunity to benefit from their investments while accelerating their cloud migration,” said Casey McGee, Vice President, Global ISV Partner Sales, Microsoft. “Together, we are working to help customers around the world transform their businesses, and drive digital transformation and implement workload migration initiatives more rapidly. This is a significant opportunity, particularly for Microsoft customers as they move more workloads to Azure.”

Avaya OneCloud is an experience platform dedicated to empowering organizations to compose unique, modernized and personal experiences that meet the ever-changing needs of their customers and employees. Organizations can more rapidly introduce new experiences and capabilities to their existing solutions, and empower employees to be more productive while working in new ways, and surprise and delight their customers across every interaction.

Avaya has achieved co-sell ready status, which means Avaya will work directly with Microsoft sales teams and partners on joint selling and enablement opportunities. This strategic partnership makes it even easier for customers to benefit from their investments in Microsoft technologies to accelerate moving communications and contact center workloads to Azure.

“The addition of Avaya OneCloud to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace provides customers with the agility to create communications and collaboration experiences using the public, private or hybrid cloud delivery approaches to offer the broadest range of options to fit an organization’s needs,” said R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, Inc. “By partnering with Microsoft on both enablement and go-to-market, Avaya gains expanded customer reach and a significant new influencing channel to broadcast its unique agility and experience proposition. Further, organizations gain the benefit of expertise from these two global leaders to advance their innovation agenda.”

In addition to the reliability and scale of Microsoft Azure, Avaya CCaaS customers gain access to the power of Nuance’s Contact Center AI technology integrated with OneCloud. “The combined capabilities of Microsoft and Nuance give Avaya customers flexibility to create and deliver intelligent, personalized, and impactful consumer interactions with long-term investment protection and control of their data,” said Tony Lorentzen, Senior Vice President of Intelligent Engagement Solutions at Nuance, a Microsoft company.

This news builds on Avaya’s longstanding relationship with Microsoft. Together Avaya, Microsoft and Nuance provide true integration, spanning not just the contact center application itself but also the underlying communication platforms. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers have increased customer insight via CRM data maintained within Dynamics 365, and benefit from Microsoft’s powerful AI capabilities via Azure Cognitive Services. Later this year, Avaya expects to further expand OneCloud CCaaS capabilities with Microsoft Teams integration, allowing customers to more broadly use the expertise and knowledge of their entire organization in servicing customers via the contact center.