Gitex 2022: Avaya aims for innovation without disruption as it reveals cloud comms partners

Avaya has used leading global IT event Gitex to reveal the next generation of products and services that it believes can provide businesses with the innovation they require over the top of their existing infrastructures. It has also struck a number of key partnerships with Wavenet and Uniphore that the communications and collaboration tech firm believes will help it achieve its aim.

The overarching theme of Avaya’s presence at Gitex is innovation without disruption, showcasing how technology can allow companies to achieve essential business outcomes while avoiding disruption to core operations in a time of economic uncertainty.

At Gitex, the use cases will aim to demonstrate how the Avaya OneCloud platform can enable organisations to deliver customer and employee experiences without the need for wholesale technology refreshes, helping firms to simplify and speed innovation and efficiencies in delivering experiences. Use cases being demonstrated include metaverse as a channel, using the metaverse as a communications channel between contact centre agents and customers.

Digital customer journeys are designed to enable companies to onboard customers digitally, starting from a social media advertisement, moving to artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chat over social media, to finally selling a holiday.

Proactive relationship management use cases are based on advanced collaboration features to better manage client relationships, as well as outbound capabilities for upselling and AI-powered biometrics for authentication. AI and analytics show how organisations can use facial biometrics, chatbots, speech analytics and conversational AI to improve the customer experience. Smart dispatching solutions and mass notifications combine with the internet of things with the aim of enabling safer cities.

Yet despite the welter of advanced tech, Nidal Abou-Ltaif, president at Avaya International, stressed that anyone can have a technology product, but most important was how to make it relevant to the customer and deliver the correct business outcome. “You see the progress and the pace [in development] so that the customer can implement it, modify it, change it, see the outcome,” he told Computer Weekly.

“We see how this technology can help them and deliver the outcome needed. And as things are changing, too fast, we start to see more and more pressure coming into our customer business, which is based on contact and collaboration technology.

“We are at the heart of digital transformation, and we need to adapt and adequately digitise what we do to help our customers. It’s not about technology. It’s not about AI. It’s how you put all of this technology with the business case.”

Central to this strategy is partnerships and at Gitex, Avaya announced that it is to work with Wavenet, a provider of cloud-based telecoms and technology systems, which will act as a wholesale service provider and tier 1 value-added reseller of OneCloud across the UK.

Putting the partnership intro context, Avaya cited research from Forrester showing that 92% of companies in the UK, France and Germany have adopted cloud computing, driven largely by demand for new applications and affordable compute and storage for existing applications.

The partnership will aim to address this demand with a combined unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) offering with bundled calls and minutes that enables UK-based organisations to deliver enhanced experiences for customers and employees at multiple touchpoints.

Antony Black, director of wholesale at Wavenet, said: “Our partners are serving customers in a business environment that has changed significantly over the past couple of years, and against that backdrop, it’s no surprise that demand for cloud-based communications experience technology has increased.”

With Uniphore, Avaya will set out to bring its integrated conversational and communications platform to customers across the Middle East and Africa region.

Uniphore offers an integrated conversational AI and automation platform that combines natural language processing , robotic process automation, automatic speech recognition, including the Arabic language, emotion AI and knowledge AI. Said to be what enterprises need in today’s tech-savvy consumer era, the technology components translate into specific customer offerings in chatbots, voice bots, conversational analytics for quality automation, real-time customer analysis and agent guidance.

Uniphore’s conversational AI and automation products will add deep functionality to the Avaya OneCloud CCaaS platform so that users can track, measure and improve their contact centre journey with increased self-serve capabilities, offering what is described as “frictionless” agent experience and “needle-moving” insights.

Avaya’s customers will also have access to Uniphore’s conversational AI and automation technology and will be able to onboard customers digitally, including from social media platforms driven by AI-based systems.