Avaya Engage 18 wasn’t just a time of celebration for the global communications company, it was also a chance to announce their most recent acquisition on the path to a more agile, cloud-focused framework. CEO Jim Chirico introduced the Spoken Communications acquisition on the first day of the event, although the terms of the deal remain somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Spoken Communications is a cloud-based company built on the Avaya platform that uses speech recognition to automate call centre processes. With Spoken, Avaya will be fully on track to become a leader in the CC industry, as well as the UC sector. I followed up with Laurent Philonenko, the General Manager of Technology & Solutions, and Senior Vice President of Avaya in a group session, to learn more about the purchase, and where Avaya is headed.
How is Avaya Evolving This Year?
Laurent began the group session by discussing the Avaya roadmap for the future, saying that the business will be focused on making it easier for customers to engage with them. “We need to remove every friction in the selling cycle so that we can speed up and get ahead.”
Avaya is embracing a market plan that, as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, Mercer Rowe put it, is accelerating at “cloud speed”. According to Laurent, this means that the company needs to become more agile, moving additional products onto the market, and working with their customers to get an edge in innovation.
“We’re really starting to work with customers. That means no more long cycles. We’re getting faster and more focused.”
As one of the people in the group session pointed out an “agile” framework can be hard to manage with the right level of security. Avaya’s customers expect the brand to be compliant, secure, and scalable, which means that they can’t afford to compromise when putting faster solutions into the marketplace. Laurent acknowledged the difficulty of combining security and agility but also said that we’re living in a world where it’s easier to produce mock-up products in a shorter amount of time.
“Obviously we’re working on GDPR compliance and security, that’s a given. But there’s not much work to do on the product side of things.”
Avaya is going to continue being careful with their customer records, supplier records and more as they move into the future with Spoken Communications.
What Kind of Market Does Spoken Deliver?
With concerns about security put to rest, I was interested to find out what kind of market Avaya will be entering or expanding on with their acquisition of Spoken Communications. While Spoken was traditionally a contact centre solution for the larger enterprise, that’s only the foundation for Avaya. Philonenko said that the brand will be expanding the Spoken system into UCaaS and mid-market too.
“It might be better to think of Spoken as a multi-tenant, scalable cloud architecture – complete with all the benefits cloud offers. Spoken has scalability, elasticity, redundancy, and on-demand activation too.”
Ultimately, the Spoken purchase will help Avaya in migrating its enterprise solutions for communication into the cloud environment. Avaya will also be tapping into the successful IntelligentWire platform by Spoken too. This core product works by analysing calls in real-time and providing follow-up tools for the contact centre agent. It also captures keywords and uses those terms to initiate important system processes.
How Will You Be Extending Spoken into UCaaS?
Spoken has already established significant amounts of success in its space. In 2017, Avaya and Spoken entered into a co-development partnership to give Avaya more opportunities to automate their contact centre practices. Now, they’ll be moving beyond the contact centre and looking at a different sales opportunity too.
Philonenko said that the standard offer from Spoken today is contact centre seats, alongside voice. Moving into UCaaS means moving different capabilities into an effective package for new customers. “In the cloud, you have this core service and the surrounding services. We need to do some work to create a UC solution that’s packaged and presented in a way that helps us to win and onboard new customers.”
Importantly, in response to a question about how the Spoken acquisition will go forward with branding, Laurent said that the goal of Avaya is not to absorb the company and digest it but drive their cloud solution from Spoken.
“We’re bringing a great team onboard with plenty of unique technologies and talents, and we don’t want to lose sight of that.”
How Is Avaya Becoming More Customer-Focused?
During Jim Chirico’s keynote speech, there was mention that Avaya would be doing more to bring decision making closer to the field. I asked Philonenko what the brand would be doing to empower their customers in the future. He told me that Avaya is actively in the process of taking big decisions to the field, and asking their customers and partners what they need to do to evolve, and which ideas they should invest in.
“We want to make sure that we have a solid grasp on what our customers absolutely want and need. When we do make new products, we want our customers to be a part of that cycle. We’ll be making our R&D development processes more visible and ensuring that we validate new ideas as quickly as we can.”
In the past, while Avaya has always strived to serve their customers, they haven’t been able to systematically bring the customer into the development process. Now, they’re breaking down the silos within their community and making sure that everyone works together to deliver a more customer-centric solution.
With his eye on the future, Laurent said that we will begin to see more progress from Avaya in the coming months, as the brand continues to launch more innovative solutions.
“We’re in an industry where there’s ample opportunity for growth out there, all we need to do is embrace the possibilities that are out there.”
