Avaya enters into a strategic partnership with Microsoft

Avaya, a global provider of communications and collaboration solutions, and Microsoft Corp. have expanded their global partnership by combining the industry-leading Avaya OneCloud™ portfolio with Microsoft Azure to give businesses more options for increasing productivity and customer engagement with unrivaled reliability, agility, and scale. Avaya is expanding its relationship with Azure to encompass the Avaya OneCloud portfolio for clients who want maximum freedom to deploy in a hybrid, public, or private cloud environment, building on the success of Avaya OneCloud™  Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) provided on Azure.

“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 that enables businesses to create unique, updated, and personalized experiences that match their customers’ and workers’ changing needs. Organizations can add new experiences and capabilities to their existing solutions more quickly, empowering employees to be more productive while working in new ways, and surprising and delighting consumers at every touchpoint.

Avaya has earned co-sell readiness, which means it will collaborate directly with Microsoft sales teams and partners on combined selling and enablement opportunities. This collaborative alliance makes it even easier for clients to get the most out of their Microsoft investments by speeding up the migration of 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 announcement adds to Avaya’s long-standing partnership with Microsoft. Avaya, Microsoft, and Nuance work together to enable genuine integration, which extends beyond the contact center application to the underlying communication systems. Customers of Avaya OneCloud CCaaS benefit from Microsoft’s sophisticated AI capabilities via Azure Cognitive Services, as well as greater customer insight via CRM data preserved within Dynamics 365. Avaya plans to expand OneCloud CCaaS capabilities with Microsoft Teams integration later this year, allowing clients to more fully employ their entire organization’s skills and knowledge in serving customers via the contact center.