Avaya has strengthened its Microsoft partnership, announcing that all Avaya OneCloud solutions are now available on Azure.
After numerous successful implementations of the Avaya OneCloud CCaaS solution through the public cloud computing platform, its CPaaS and UCaaS will now join the mix.
As such, companies can benefit from the flexibility of deploying the popular solutions in a hybrid, public, or private cloud environment.
Discussing the partnership in more detail, David Austin, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Alliances at Avaya, added:
“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.
By harnessing the Avaya OneCloud portfolio, companies can capture new chances to enhance the maturity of their contact centers, building better customer and employee experiences.
Meanwhile, Avaya will work alongside Microsoft sales teams and partners to seize the optimum selling and enablement opportunities.
Many such opportunities will likely spring from companies with existing investments in Microsoft, which wish to accelerate the migration of communications and contact center workloads to Azure.
Over time, these contact center workloads may move to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service solution as the company ramps up its CCaaS plans. However, at the present moment, many of these native Microsoft capabilities are at an early stage of the development cycle.
With that said, Microsoft has recently completed its acquisition of Nuance – a leader in contact center AI. Over time, such AI will likely become embedded within the Dynamics solution.
Yet, the opportunity for the Avaya and Nuance teams to innovate together is also exciting. As Tony Lorentzen, Senior Vice President of Intelligent Engagement Solutions at Nuance, said:
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.
In addition, the partnership will allow contact centers powered by Avaya OneCloud to store, maintain, and harness data within the Dynamics 365 CRM. They may also benefit from the powerful AI capabilities within Azure Cognitive Services.
These AI capabilities will align with those already at the fingertips of Avaya customers, such as its “ready to deploy” virtual agent launched at the backend of April.
