It was an impressive Avaya ENGAGE from CEO Alan Masarek and his company, a confident and insightful conference that reassured customers and shareholders after such a period of uncertainty and adversity.

Only very recently did Avaya exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Avaya, in the summer of 2023, is looking strong and stable, relishing the next stage of fulfilling its vision under Masarek.

Its success prompted one overarching question prompted by Masarek in an exclusive interview with UC Today — was Avaya back?

“I’m not sure Avaya ever went away!” Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, told UC Today. “Their customer base is still very big.”

However, Kerravala recognised that they’re now in a much healthier position with exciting opportunities to push forwards.

“Everything is set up for them to be a success on paper,” Kerravala said. “They’ve got a new management team and some new C-level executives. I’ve heard there’s more coming. They’ve restructured things financially, so the big debt load they’d had and the looming payments that might hurt the company are gone.”

“They’ve got a good product roadmap here. When you talk to the customers, I’ve always said that Avaya has this oddly loyal customer base. For all the stuff this company has been through over the past few years, the customers really like the technology.”

“I do think that things on paper are set up for them,” Kerravala added, “but now they have to execute. Are they back? They’re back as strong as they can be, given Alan’s been in the CEO role for about a year.”

What, specifically, Avaya has done to reach this position — beyond its financial restructuring — is by refining its strategy. Avaya’s messaging, go-to-market, and portfolio have all been renovated and streamlined. The plan is based on pursuing what Masarek calls the “North Star” of CX and what Kerravala summarised as “the guiding light for the company”.

“I think that’s been a big change,” Kerravala continued. “I thought, under the last CEO (Jim Chirico), he was really operationally focused. He only ever talked about transitioning to software and subscription, and that was really more of a financial reengineering of the way they sell. But Alan Masarek has been much more focused on rounding out their portfolio.”

“Historically, when you look at their products, they had a mess on their hands. They had old products, new products, different roadmaps for those things, and different development teams. It created a very inefficient R&D cycle.”

“Now it’s very clear. They can take customers on this continuum of any kind of cloud they want, but they have a definitive landing spot for whatever that customer really wants. Before, it was really this hodgepodge of stuff. I do think the company and product receptor is in better shape.”

Much of the conference was about affirming clarity of direction and confidence of leadership, but was there anything particularly surprising to Kerravala?

“How loyal the customer base is,” Kerravala said. “Also, I think one of the things that’s misunderstood in the industry is when you talk to a lot of Avaya customers here, they’re very big companies. They’ve got massive contact centres. You think of a company like Southwest Airlines, who they had on stage. Liberty Mutual, who they had on stage. The customers they had on the stages here were excellent. They’ve always had companies on stage, but sometimes they were little companies you’d never heard of before.”

Kerravala noted that these massive companies often carry a lot of technical debt, which problematises any ambition of smoothly and quickly moving to the cloud. Avaya’s more patient migratory solutions address these complex needs.

“They need that migration approach,” he explained. “So, I think it’s a little counter to the way the rest of the industry thinks, where we assume everybody is going to move to the cloud overnight, but that resonated with this audience loud and clear. They want a migration path, not something they’re going to have to forklift upgrade.”

If the event was partly about celebrating the present — the challenges overcome and the stability achieved — it was also about outlining the future and convincing Avaya customers to believe in the project. Masarek wrapped up the show by asking customers to trust Avaya and by asserting that Avaya will repay that trust in kind.

“I think, in order for that to happen, they need to do the things they’ve said they’re going to do,” Kerravala said. “Alan says they’re going to publish roadmaps and have commitment dates where they’re going to release new features. They’ve got to hit those things. In the past, that hasn’t been Avaya’s strong suit, and part of it comes down to the way they did their R&D and the way they did their engineering. They tended to shift priorities a lot.”

“But if they’re going to ask the customers to trust them, they have to lay out those roadmaps, lay out those dates, and hit them. Because if you can’t do that, then I’m not sure why the customers would trust them. But if they can, I do think this audience will fall back in line with them because they tend to generate like them.”



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