Avaya has offered “everyone at the company” a voluntary exit package, a person familiar with the matter told CX Today.
The source revealed that Avaya hopes the move will shed “a lot of employees”.
CX Today has reached out to Avaya for a statement, but the company declined to comment.
The objective to shed employees is one Avaya has chased since its CEO transition, announced in July 2024.
Just four months later, Avaya kick-started a sweeping round of layoffs. While these initially impacted North America, they stretched across the globe by early 2025.
In January, CX Today learned the layoffs left some regions, including Europe and the Middle East, threadbare.
Now, Avaya appears to be following up with another drastic move to cut its staff further and leave some areas with little more than a remote presence.
Reacting to the speculation, Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, told CX Today:
Such a move would likely aim to maximize profitability, so Avaya can return profit to equity holders.
Having only emerged from a second bankruptcy in seven years in January 2024, these headlines will fan the flames of speculation about Avaya’s long-term future.
After all, if and when it does return that equity to its holders, what’s next? Yet another reset for a company long defined by restructuring.
Avaya’s Future Hinges on Its Partners
Once dominant in contact centers and unified communications, Avaya missed the shift to CCaaS and UCaaS, despite initially experimenting with cloud-based services like Avaya OneCloud, AXP, Avaya Spaces, and Zang Cloud.
These experiments highlight Avaya’s troubling pattern of missing early market signals, weak execution, and late timing.
As a result, it has leaned more and more on its partners to overlay its core infrastructure with the latest cloud innovations. That led to a rising reliance on the likes of RingCentral, Verint, and Zoom.
It 2024 Annual Customer Report spotlights these alliances, with Verint powering CX automation and Zoom Workplace bolstering collaboration.
Yet, Verint’s new owner, Thoma Bravo, and Zoom’s own enterprise ambitions highlight the vulnerability in its story of outsourcing innovation.
Indeed, the strategy is playing with fire. If Thoma Bravo decides to completely restructure Verint and turn its roadmap upside down, many of Avaya’s customers’ roadmaps will be turned upside down.
Given how much of Avaya’s customer base are steady Eddie enterprises, that’s a big concern.
As such, the exits could also be a move to get out in front of future disruptions. Nevertheless, they’re not a good look for the trouble-plagued business.
The Bottom Line
Avaya’s cloud story has become increasingly fragmented, partner-reliant, and dependent on protecting its base. It’s not disrupting the market.
Meanwhile, it’s playing for survival, not growth.
That’s evidenced by its reported strategy to fixate on keeping its top 1,500 global enterprise customers, not chasing others.
With that strategy, Avaya has framed itself as a stable choice for conservative, hybrid enterprise contact center environments.
However, the continued employee exits and the control its partners have over its own destiny somewhat counteract that image.
That will give its customers plenty of food for thought. For so long, they’ve valued continuity at the expense of innovation. Yet, these similar, repeated headlines may make them question this approach.
Thanks to Tim Banting, Head of Research & Business Intelligence at Techtelligence, for co-authoring this article.
