Recent reports have painted a bleak picture of the current status quo at Avaya.
The most recent comes from the Wall Street Journal, which suggests it’s reaching a chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.
Such a filing would be its second within six years.
However, before buying into all the doomsday prophecies, remember: chapter 11 (restructuring) is not chapter 7 (liquidation).
Businesses turn to chapter 11 to help them reorganize their debts and repay creditors while continuing their operations.
Yet, the situation is troubling, especially with Avaya forecasting its Q4 revenues to have dropped to somewhere between $460m and $480m. That is significantly down from the $760m it recorded in the same quarter last year.
Avaya will offset much of this loss with a cost-cutting program that is set to achieve run rate savings of $524m by Q1 2024.
However, it now seems clear that Avaya must do much more, with revenues expected to decline further in 2023 and 2024, before it projects a return to growth in 2025.
As such, CX Today caught up with Steve Forcum, Head of Solution Marketing & Chief Evangelist at Avaya, to uncover how it plans to streamline its portfolio and retain a significant chunk of its customer base.
Avaya Will Narrow Its Focus
Part of Avaya’s restructure will include cuts to its portfolio, with many of its solutions likely to be sold off.
Avaya shared the following chart, which hints at this. Within it, there are 34 blurred-out bullet points under the category “exit”.
[caption id="attachment_46823" align="alignnone" width="430"]
The screenshot highlights how Avaya is set to cull elements of its portfolio.[/caption]
Unfortunately, Forcum could not disclose these details of these. Yet, it seems that the cuts chiefly aim to reduce overlapping solutions and product initiatives that distract from its new narrow focus.
The focus will fixate on three go-to-market initiatives. These are: Premises-based (includes Aura and Elite), Cloud (includes ACO and Experience Platform), and Hybrid.
With the latter particularly, Avaya seems to spot an opportunity to meet a market desire to deliver specific cloud services to its single-tenant clients.
By doing so, Avaya aims to support businesses that want an incremental journey to the cloud.
"Evolution, not revolution," as Forcum puts it.
Indeed, many of its competitors – including market leaders like NICE, Five9, and Genesys – offer a platform change to a single, public cloud solution.