Avaya Engages in Silicon Valley

Just before the holidays, Avaya held a customer, analyst, and consultant event in Santa Clara, CA. Called "Avaya Engages Silicon Valley," the event emphasized three messages, from my perspective: engagement, innovation, and relevance. Here are a few comments on each.

• Engagement: From the opening keynote by CEO Kevin Kennedy right on through the day, the Avaya buzzword was engagement. The new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Andy Cunningham, followed Kevin to make major points about engagement as key to connecting the enterprise to their customers and as key to increasing productivity of teams.

The customer connection emphasis was a natural extension of Avaya’s strength in contact center technologies. Here the message was that consumer communities are driven by emotions and sentiment which can be engaged by the enterprise through multi-channel interactions with continuity over time and with community visibility, such as by consumer voting, posting or other referral-type engagements. This was a pretty compelling presentation that will likely appeal to Avaya's industry-leading base of contact center operations.

The application of engagement to the productivity of teams, though, seemed like more of a branding exercise than any particular breakthrough. Specifically, Avaya claimed that "collaboration is not sufficient" since teams need to be engaged to be productive. Also, Avaya defined engagement as an outcome. Both of those statements are reminiscent of management training seminars, rather than value propositions from a communications technology company. Based on data and customer references, it was clear that a well-managed and well-engaged team could increase their output, but the difference was organizational, not technological.

The demonstrations of "team engagement" we saw in late-morning breakout sessions were essentially the same Avaya UC voice, video, conferencing and sharing technologies as in the past, with a slightly modified presentation script sprinkled with the word engagement.

It seems to me that the Avaya "engagement" message is likely to be an effective message in the contact center marketplace, but seems far less likely to change anything in the team collaboration category, since the benefits depend on changes in the customers’ management methods that Avaya’s channels are not prepared to support.

• Innovation – Part 1: The event highlighted a number of incremental product line enhancements to support the engagement theme (see Avaya press release).

For customer engagement, these included Avaya Social Responder to connect social networks to the contact center; Avaya Snap-ins to add contact center capabilities into web-based interfaces; a customer engagement transformation consulting service to help Avaya’s customers maximize their engagement benefits; and an Avaya contact center agent software package specifically for the Google Chromebook. Avaya emphasized the latter as adding Google to the Avaya partner ecosystem, but it sure seems more like the other way around – Avaya has added their call center agent software as a Chromebook app on Google Play.

For team engagement, Avaya has renamed their application development environment software from Avaya Collaboration Environment to Avaya Engagement Environment and is also offering this development environment from the cloud as the Avaya Collaboratory (surprised it is not the “Engagatory”) at the price of $999 for 90-days’ use including a full suite of Avaya Aura software licenses for application testing. Avaya is also offering AvayaLive™ Video for $99 per user per month which is a very high per-user price in today’s market. Also, in this category, Avaya described a future consolidation of their many user interfaces into the new Avaya Communicator client; this is a much-needed, long-awaited change which Avaya indicated is slated for availability in the second half of 2015.

• Innovation – Part 2: One shining star of innovation is Avaya’s success in delivery of maintenance services. Over the past several years, Mike Runda, Avaya Senior Vice President and President, Avaya Client Services (ACS), has led the Avaya Services team to dramatic improvements in customer service levels, customer satisfaction, and services business metrics. The most impressive part of this is the commitment of the ACS team to measurable results. They have achieved an 8% year-over-year improvement in Net Promoter Scores (NPS), now at a very solid 49%. Traditional customer satisfaction metrics are also up from about 4.2 to 4.3 on a 5.0 scale. And the true measure of a support team, recovery time for customer outages, shows a 21% improvement in the past year. Improvements continue in automated web services, which customers are embracing at a 91% rate, and Avaya services customers now have the option of 2-way video chat with the services team. Overall, a continuation of a major transformation since Mike Runda’s arrival (see this June 2013 post).
  
  
• Relevance: This was an undercurrent of the entire event. Avaya highlighted their relationships with high-profile Internet-based and cloud-based companies as illustrated by a main-stage panel of Avaya partners that featured Google, Salesforce.com, HP, and VMWare. The CEO of Plantronics also came on stage as part of the well-done demonstration of intelligent headset technology to enable seamless communications between mobile and desk Unified Communications environments.

Kevin Kennedy also emphasized Avaya’s increasingly healthy financial picture and Avaya’s innovative moves to redefine networking. Avaya seems to be betting big on the ability of their Fabric Networking products both to simplify network management and to improve application performance on fabric-based networks. There’s no doubt that Avaya sees this as a growth vector for Avaya’s future.

Overall, the event was very well done as to content, pace, and access to Avaya’s executive team. Avaya is certainly making positive moves to polish the company’s image in the communications and networking community. The emphasis on engagement comes across quite positively in context of Avaya’s contact center business, but the proof of "team engagement" is yet to be seen in Avaya’s business results and product line evolutions. Current Avaya customers can be encouraged; prospective buyers of unified communications and collaboration may find that the updated Avaya message warrants short-list consideration.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Avaya Engages the Analysts, by Blair Pleasant