“We’ll remember Gitex 2022 as the year that CCaaS really showed up for Avaya, in a big way,” says Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research.
Indeed, Avaya OneCloud CCaaS has come of age since Gitex 2018, when the vendor first launched the platform.
At the time, the solution was in its infancy, not available everywhere, and voice-only.
Fast-forward four years, and the offering is much deeper, with the Avaya OneCloud suite at the forefront of the vendor’s battle to make more headway into the SaaS market.
Now, it offers an array of channels and many supplementary tools, which will help to build confidence in cloud migration across its extensive on-premise customer base.
Of course, Avaya is later to the game than many of its CCaaS competitors. Yet, talking to its CCaaS customers at Gitex 2022, Kerravala noted that many seemed to single out the solution’s extensibility as a significant strength. He said:
No two customers are the same. So, with every deal – even with a SaaS offering – you will want to do some customization. And the customers I’ve talked to say it is very easy to work on top of Avaya CCaaS and use APIs to do lots of truly innovative things.
The vendor is also building momentum around its Avaya Experience Builders initiative, which offers developers a framework to craft new solutions in the cloud and "tap into endless opportunities."
Such offerings have enabled Avaya to close the CCaaS gap. Moreover, Kerravala believes that the vendor’s late entrance into the space could prove beneficial in the long run.
"Sometimes being late to market isn’t such a bad thing," said Kerravala. "Think about how much technology in the cloud has changed, from the first versions of CCaaS – when we had monolithic stacks of software.
Now, lots of vendors are having to rebuild their product to be cloud-native, whereas Avaya started with a blank slate and is able to build on its cloud technology. So, that should give them an advantage moving forward.
Avaya Teams Up Avanza Solutions to Deliver a New Metaverse Experience
In addition to beating the CCaaS drum, Avaya grasped Gitex 2022 as the ideal opportunity to exhibit its latest metaverse use case.
Working with Avanza Solutions, the vendor showcased a digital twin of process businesses follow to come and open up shop in Dubai.
Such a task is non-trivial. It involves looking into the real-estate, applying for permits, completing VISA processes. These steps – alongside others – can take months, if not years.
Now, Avaya and Avanza are enabling people to do it all in the metaverse.
If they have a problem, users can speak to a metaverse agent – harnessing the Avaya CCaaS product – who will support them through the process and remove layers of complexity.
"I think that is something all governments should be looking at," added Kerravala. "Here in Dubai, the government is very forward-thinking and the public sector drives a lot of innovation… I think this use of the metaverse is very creative and innovative."