Avaya enters strategic partnership with Microsoft to deliver CCaaS on Azure cloud

With all the broad technology shifts that have taken place during the pandemic, networked resources have become most vital, and investment in cloud resources has accelerated this uptake. Tapping into the huge demand for cloud-based communications, Avaya and Microsoft have expanded their global partnership by pairing Avaya OneCloud portfolio with Microsoft Azure.

As modernising user computing and experience management is necessary to bring about greater IT and business alignment, the two firms are aiming to give organisations more options to increase their productivity and customer engagement with reliability, agility and scale.

Building on the existing deployment of the Avaya OneCloud contact centre as a service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure, Avaya is now expanding its partnership to include the Avaya OneCloud portfolio on the same platform for customers that want maximum flexibility to deploy in a hybrid, public or private cloud environment.

In addition to the Microsoft Azure, Avaya CCaaS customers will gain access to the power of Nuance’s Contact Centre AI technology integrated with OneCloud. The combined capabilities is said to give Avaya customers flexibility to create and deliver intelligent, personalised consumer interactions with long-term investment protection and control of their data.

Looking at what the partnership could mean for enterprises, Ray Wang, CEO on analyst Constellation Research, said: “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 organisation’s needs.

“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, organisations gain the benefit of expertise from these two global leaders to advance their innovation agenda.”  

David Austin, Avaya senior vice-president of strategy and alliances, added: “Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is an important milestone in our continued transformation to a cloud business model. 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.”

Avaya has achieved co-sell ready status, which means Avaya will work directly with Microsoft sales teams and partners on joint selling and enablement opportunities. The strategic partnership is intended to make it even easier for customers to benefit from their investments in Microsoft technologies to accelerate moving communications and contact centre workloads to Azure. 

“Many of our largest customers have standardised 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 Microsoft vice-president of global ISV partner sales, Casey McGee.

“Together, we are working to help customers around the world to 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.” 

Later this year, Avaya expects to further expand OneCloud CCaaS capabilities with Microsoft Teams integration, allowing customers to more broadly use the expertise and knowledge of their entire organisation in servicing customers via the contact centre.