The IT Nerd

Avaya today announced that Avaya is again positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, the ninth time that the company has been in a Leader position. Companies in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant are defined as companies that “execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.”

Avaya improved its position on both ability to execute and completeness of vision compared to the previous year’s results.

Avaya is investing significantly in its Unified Communications portfolio to provide customers the solutions they want and need to fully leverage UC, including telephony, video, mobility, messaging, meetings and team collaboration. For example, the Avaya Equinox application now streamlines collaboration across all communications channels for small businesses to large enterprise, and a new suite of handsets further integrates applications to help drive new levels of efficiencies. Customers can also deploy in leading cloud environments in addition to other Infrastructure as a Service options, with further Avaya Cloud options planned. And over the course of the next year, the company will introduce additional innovative capabilities with AI and blockchain integrations.

The 2018 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report evaluated eight UC vendors on completeness of vision and ability to execute. Gartner then positions companies within one of four quadrants: Visionaries, Niche Players, Challengers, and Leaders. Gartner defines “Unified Communications Solutions — equipment, software and services — as offerings that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to achieve those aims. UC solutions integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications, and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices.” Gartner divides UC into six broad communication product areas: Telephony, Meeting Solutions, Messaging, Presence and Instance Messaging (IM), Clients, and Communications-Enabled Business Processes.

In May, Avaya was positioned as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide, marking the 17th time that Avaya has been in a Leader position.

Avaya today announced that Network Products Guide, one of the industry’s leading technology research and advisory guides, has named Avaya a Gold winner for Business Intelligence and Analytics in the 13th Annual 2018 IT World Awards. These industry and peer recognitions from Network Products Guide are premier information technology awards honoring achievements and recognition across every facet of the IT industry.

The Avaya Happiness Index on Blockchain enables organizations to dynamically manage the customer journey to achieve greater satisfaction. Developed in partnership with Avanza Innovations, this unique solution securely collects and automatically analyzes customer interaction data from multiple sources across all channels in real time, harnessing innovative technologies in the areas of blockchain, artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to transform customer experience.

The blockchain infrastructure securely collects and shares anonymous customer interaction data from a network of peers, while the real-time automated analysis of speech and text (chat, IM, email and SMS) interactions instantly identifies behaviors and trends, accelerating an organization’s ability to anticipate requirements and proactively respond to customer demands.

An annual achievements and recognition awards program with active participation from a broad spectrum of industry voices, the annual IT World Awards recognition program encompasses the world’s best in organizational performance, products and services, hot technologies, executives and management teams, successful deployments, product management and engineering, customer satisfaction, and public relations in every area of information technology.

More than 80 judges from a broad spectrum of industry voices from around the world participated and their average scores determined the 2018 award winners. Winners will be honored in San Francisco on Monday, July 30, 2018 during the annual SVUS Red Carpet Awards Ceremony Dinner in San Francisco attended by the finalists, winners, judges and industry peers.

Avaya today announced that Telarus, the largest, privately-held technology services distributor (master agent) in the U.S., is offering Avaya cloud unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) solutions through the Avaya Master Agent program. As an industry thought leader, Telarus will help drive Avaya’s Communications Cloud solutions through its nationwide network of sales agents.

Telarus sales agents can offer an industry-leading solution to customers which will include:

• Unified communications services, fully hosted by Avaya;
• Bundled carrier services, i.e., minutes, SIP Trunks;
• Desktop options;
• Delivery, management, and support, and
• Monthly, subscription-based billing.

Telarus is the newest cloud Master Agent for Avaya. Avaya will host a booth at the Telarus Partner Xchange Conference on June 19-21, 2018, where sales agents can learn more details directly from Avaya experts.

For more information about becoming an Avaya sales agent, please email agentsales@avaya.com

Avaya today introduced a new version of the Avaya Workforce Optimization suite, which improves service quality, operational and employee productivity and data privacy with a series of new features and tools. This major software release helps companies transform customer engagement and comply with existing and emerging industry regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

IDC research commissioned by Avaya found that employee productivity is a key driver of digital transformation – a necessary step that sets the groundwork through which enterprises are better prepared to achieve the higher revenue growth associated with a better customer experience. While optimizing the customer experience and service delivery is critical to winning and keeping business, only 28 percent of companies believe they integrate customer communications with fulfillment and delivery extremely well.  

Avaya Workforce Optimization also addresses a key concern of enterprises and customers around the world today: securing personal data and keeping it private. Driven by the European GDPR requirements, Avaya strengthened data privacy with the newest features to help securely record, process, archive, and protect customers’ personal data to reach compliance goals.

Other notable features included in the latest Avaya Workforce Optimization release enable enterprises to:

• Improve operational effectiveness and accuracy with real-time speech analytics – Calls can be monitored in real-time to detect words and phrases of interest and to drive interactions to better outcomes.
• Improve customer and employee satisfaction – Supervisors and quality managers become better coaches and improve employee engagement through automated quality management, speeding scoring for some or all questions on evaluation forms.
• Improve data privacy and regulatory compliance – Enterprises can safely record, archive and protect personal data through advanced, 256-compliant encryption, Payment Card Industry Security (PCI), data identification and tagging and identify consent/no consent situations to help ensure GDPR compliance.

 Read the HomeChoice case study here.

Avaya has announced that the new Avaya IP Office™ release is now available globally. Avaya IP Office helps businesses drive greater productivity and streamline collaboration through a single application for all communications channels, meetings, team collaboration and content sharing. Avaya IP Office adds support for Avaya Equinox®, the company’s signature UC experience, as well as other new capabilities that provide an enterprise-level experience with the ease of use and management that small and midsize businesses require.

The enhanced IP Office solution includes Avaya’s innovative unified communications and collaboration capabilities and can deliver greater value through flexible deployment options – cloud, hybrid and on-premises. Avaya IP Office can leverage the unique Avaya Vantage and newest J Series desktop phones for voice and video, in addition to the Avaya Equinox soft and mobile clients. For European customers, the solution also nearly doubles scalability for DECT users.

For the small business, a new highly affordable, cradle-to-grave reporting and tracking package improves measurement of call activities to enable even the smallest of organizations to enhance customer engagement. Avaya Chronicall for IP Office, OEM’d from Avaya DevConnect partner Xima, provides over 50 standard plus customizable reports that support visual call management, customizable displays and agent performance, and is available in both on-premises and Powered by Avaya IP Office cloud deployments.

Partners utilizing Avaya’s Powered by IP Office cloud platform also benefit from these new capabilities and can offer them to new or existing customers in either a full cloud or hybrid cloud deployment delivery model. Partners will also have new installation wizards and management tools to make it even easier and faster to deploy and manage both premises-based and cloud options. For example, the new Cloud Operations Manager simplifies administration of large multi-customer cloud deployments, upgrades, patching and application inventory with role-based administration that helps ensure security.

Read the blog entry for more info about the new capabilities of Avaya IP Office.

Avaya Holdings Corp. today announced strategic moves that highlight its continued focus on innovation and accelerate its momentum in driving customer success. Avaya has formed a new Innovation Incubator led by Laurent Philonenko, SVP, Innovation. Chris McGugan, who recently re-joined Avaya, will assume Philonenko’s former role as SVP, Solutions and Technology. McGugan’s deep domain knowledge of communication technologies coupled with his passion about delivering solutions that enhance business outcomes will benefit Avaya’s portfolio and go to market capabilities.

The Avaya Innovation Incubator is chartered with creating new, disruptive solutions in the market, such as the recently announced Avaya Mobile Experience. The Incubator will focus on mobility, security and artificial intelligence in particular, drawing on input from customers, partners, internal development and a future planned ecosystem to foster promising start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Avaya is a global leader in digital communications software, services and devices for businesses of all sizes. Our open, intelligent and customizable solutions for contact centers and unified communications offer the flexibility of Cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com

Avaya today announced the company is positioned as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide, marking the 17^th time that Avaya has been in the position. Companies in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant are defined as “companies that execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow”.

Companies in over 150 countries around the world choose Avaya contact center solutions to transform their customer service and support operations, including Alorica, Eletropaulo, Exelon, Florius, Liberty Mutual, Yanfeng Automotive Interior Systems and others. Avaya’s comprehensive, end-to-end portfolio helps drive digital transformation by providing the secure, flexible foundation to power seamless self and assisted service over any channel, the ability to create and integrate applications in house, from Avaya or other third parties, and the workforce management tools to ensure continuous improvement. Avaya believes the portfolio addresses the Customer Experience Priorities in 2018 identified in a Gartner report:

“Across a range of CX improvement projects, personalization, Voice of the Customer (VoC), metrics and multichannel-related projects will be the highest priority activities in 2018.”

Avaya’s flagship contact center offering, Avaya Oceana™, enables omnichannel capabilities for a personalized, multi-touch customer experience, a context-rich agent environment and seamless interactions and handoffs between mobile, self, and live service. Avaya Analytics delivers powerful, real-time and historical analysis and visualization of the customer journey. In addition, Avaya Breeze enables rapid development and integration of customized or pre-built applications – known as Avaya Snap-Ins – from Avaya and third-party developers. Avaya Workforce Optimization solutions enable companies to record the voice of the customer, analyze, and evaluate employee performance and deliver coaching to improve the customer experience.

Throughout the year, Avaya continued to advance its contact center portfolio with a number of strategic moves and innovative solutions: Offering Avaya Contact Center solutions as cloud, hybrid, or on-premises deployments – including Avaya Oceana; acquiring Spoken Communications for CCaaS for large enterprises; announcing the Avaya Mobile Experience – a unique offering that enables contact centers to identify incoming calls from mobile devices and optimize the customer experience for the device; and a strategic partnership with Afiniti to incorporate behavioral pairing into Avaya contact center routing. In addition, Avaya Ava – the company’s virtual customer assistant — made her debut equipped with natural language processing, machine learning, and innovative analytics to enable effortless customer engagement through social media and messaging platforms.

The 2018 report on the Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide, evaluated 11 different contact center infrastructure vendors on completeness of vision and ability to execute. Gartner then positions companies within one of four quadrants: Visionaries, Niche Players, Challengers, and Leaders. Gartner defines contact center infrastructure (“CCI”) as “the products (equipment, software, and services) needed to operate call centers for telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. A third deployment option for CCI is as a core component of customer engagement centers, in which functionality is tightly integrated with CRM and social media channels to give a ’single view of the customer’ across all touchpoints”.