Equinox merges all communication app infra and services for simplified user experience: Arun Shetty, Avaya

By Nandita Singh

Customers, employees and partners need a communications experience that “fits into” how they work instead of “changing” how they work, says Arun Shetty, Director of Collaboration Solutions, Avaya in an interview with Voice&Data. Excerpts:

Voice&Data: Please elaborate on Avaya’s key solutions post its transformation into a ‘software and services company’. What is the product line up and go-to-market strategy?

Arun Shetty: Technologically empowered digital native companies are disrupting the way business is done. At Avaya, we understand that “going digital” requires not only a commitment to user-defined engagement but also a commitment to an all-software development platform. The number one driver for the move towards software is our customers, who are pushing us to be in that space as today, they are looking for solutions which can work on single platform. We are executing on strategic transformation to a ‘software and services’ led platform and are focused on expanding our innovative product portfolio while driving sales and services growth in both the enterprise and mid-market segments. We are both managing the operational aspects of the business and investing for the future, our software & services account for over 74% of total revenue.

Avaya’s expanded portfolio addresses customers’ growing demand for digital transformation, software-based solutions and smart analytics, while offering compelling migration paths for both partners and customers. Digital transformation requires us to continue to evolve and simplify our portfolio of solutions and services to prioritize the quality, speed, accuracy and security of every experience when engaging with or within an enterprise. We are seeing a melding of customer and team engagement solutions, and also see acceptance of collaboration solutions. With this commonality in mind, we are building all of our customer and team engagement solutions on the same platform, Avaya Breeze. Some of our key solutions are:

Avaya Breeze: A middleware component, Breeze pulls together applications and acts as a developer platform for building new, turnkey applications. Everything we do for customer and team engagement applications and services is now based on Breeze.

Avaya Oceana: It is a new omni-channel enterprise engagement solution powered by Avaya Breeze. Built with employees, agents, and customers in mind, Oceana represents the convergence of the contact center with the enterprise. With historical and real-time analytics, Oceana provides that full contextual experience across all channels, enabling the enterprise to be smarter, employees more productive, and customers simply happier. It helps enterprises achieve business goals through unified data-driven handling of every customer interaction across any device or touch point.

Avaya Equinox: Our recently, launched platform for business communications Equinox fulfills the long-sought promise of unified communications. Avaya Equinox delivers streamlined, mobile-first communications within the applications and browsers employees “live in” for their work. Customizable through the Avaya Breeze Client SDK by vertical industry or worker requirements, Avaya Equinox is supported on desktop or mobile devices, and available out-of-the box on the elegant, all-glass Avaya Vantage device. By consolidating various applications and interfaces into one experience, Avaya Equinox liberates employees and IT departments from disjointed communications that hinder productivity and increase stress.

In the Middle East, Africa and India region, Avaya’s videoconferencing solutions have been delivering outstanding growth, and are becoming essential tools, not only for collaboration, but also the basis of innovating mobile solutions for a number of vertical industries.

Voice&Data: What are the trends in the Unified Communications (UC) space? What is happening in India market there?

Arun Shetty: In today’s business world, organizations are now looking at flexible, secured and high-end solutions in order to eliminate communication gap. This has increased the adoption of UC solutions’ deployments across industries. With employees needs changed with time, organizations are now using collaboration tools to add different applications to make communications smoother. Single-Feature Solutions are shifting into all-in-one Platforms. UC solutions today focus on different basic features moving beyond simply enabling communication. Solutions need to enable true collaboration. Enterprises are actively on the lookout for a single platform that combines all of the collaboration features they need to increase productivity and work together efficiently.

New collaboration capabilities that enable virtual work groups to share and store more and more information are proliferating at a significant rate. Organizations are moving beyond application integration to more powerful collaboration tools integrated with their communications platform. The demand for omni-channel customer support is also rising as growing business demand on businesses and e-commerce sites, importance of proficient enterprise-class contact centers in the cloud is required to improve the customer experience. With highly cost effective contact center technology available today, small to medium businesses wants to take advantage of capabilities that were not practically available to them earlier.

Voice&Data: Please elaborate on adoption levels, eco-system, market size and segments where UC is becoming pervasive?

Arun Shetty: Unified Communication market is still at a very nascent stage, according to 6Wresearch, India UC market is expected to reach $1,500 million in 2018, at a CAGR of 12.4% from 2013-2018. Voice-based unified communication solutions have acquired major piece of the market revenues in the India UC market and video conferencing is emerging as the fastest growing UC market in India. Videoconferencing has long moved from equipment to software, web-based solutions. Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) has a lot of potential and it has increasingly become popular and comes across as an extremely valuable service. As businesses keep growing and continue to adopt advanced IT infrastructure, the conference rooms in the organizations will become more complicated with too many solutions and services. VaaS will help in clearing the clutter and will be a helpful solution to adopt.

In the Middle East, Africa and India region, Avaya’s videoconferencing solutions have been delivering outstanding growth, and are becoming essential tools, not only for collaboration, but also the basis of innovating mobile solutions for a number of vertical industries.

With companies contributing to Digital India vision, this is the right time for them to pursue digitization at a higher level. Available resources and high-end collaboration technologies have successfully transformed into new sources of profitable revenue. In next few years, various components of the digital ecosystem in India including the digitized consumer, generation of digital data volumes and e-commerce are expected to mature.

With innovation at its core Avaya India has started working on solutions to address major challenges faced by vendors. Avaya Equinox merges all the communication application infrastructure and cloud-based services into a single platform to offer a simplified user experience. Until now, integrating the wide variety of forms and methods of communication into a single flow has been major challenge. Avaya Equinox has conquered that challenge for the good of end users, IT departments and businesses worldwide, delivered by a company with the vision, focus and expertise to define the future of UC.

Voice&Data: What is Avaya  product and technology road map for UC?

Arun Shetty: Presently, customers are looking for three things: higher revenue, improved customer satisfaction, which also leads to move revenue, and lower costs to enable it all. Major problem they are facing today is driving revenues. We are in the midst of an unprecedented change in the way we find, purchase and consume products and services, and businesses that can’t keep up are being left in the dust. The problems customers are facing seems overwhelming to them: their engagement tools don’t mesh with their customer data. Applications and unique capabilities they’d like to create seem too costly, complex and time consuming to justify. And they’re concerned about all the aspects of the transforming their solutions.

Our solutions have been designed to address all these challenges. Avaya solutions help customers increase revenue, offer improved customer service, and interoperable solutions are easily customized to meet the developing needs in the customer journey. Customers, employees and partners need a communications experience that fits into how they work instead of changing how they work.

Avaya is redefining unified communications to be a convenient way to engage, respond, and share. We put UC in the applications, browsers, and devices that people use every day. With the Avaya Equinox we are making communication simple, transparent, in context, and user defined. Avaya Zang an innovative cloud communications platform and communication applications-as- a-service revolutionizes the way businesses can use communications to connect with their customers and employees. Zang delivers the first all-in-one cloud communication and applications-as-a-service platform that lets anyone build custom, communications-enabled apps.

Voice&Data: What are your focus areas in India market?

Arun Shetty: We believe experience is a crucial element in the new business scenario, it is expected that by end of this year, 90 percent of companies will be competing on “Customer Experience”. We can clearly see that customer experience is driving every major business decision for most enterprises, and for good reason.

Creating an unmatched customer experience is more than just making sure you're everywhere the customer wants you be, we need to see how should we create a seamless experience that's as enjoyable for your customer as it is easy for your internal teams to deliver? Leading with User Defined Experience in the Digital World is very important and it takes experience, creating solutions for enterprise clients across every industry. We aim to achieve that with our current portfolio of solutions.

Avaya offers complete SDK and full access to Avaya’s open APIs to easily create or embed custom customer experiences. Partners can demonstrate a deeper customer understanding and value creation not available with off-the-shelf and can leverage their software specialists to design and develop industry specific use case solutions.

In addition to our solutions, Avaya is also introducing a new financial option that will allow organizations to access the latest Team and Customer Engagement Solutions on a subscription basis. Subscription-based software licensing will enable organizations to implement Avaya’s latest solutions and capabilities, while not having to incur large upfront capital outlays.

The financial agility that comes with the subscription model, which allows software expenditure to be classified as an operating expense, is becoming increasingly important as organizations continue face constrained capex budgets. Our Enterprise Software Subscription offer provides a simple and predictable cost structure over the term of the contract be it a one, three or five year term, as there is one price that includes software, upgrade entitlement, and support services.

Coming Up:

In a chat with Voice&Data, Vishal Agrawal, India & SAARC, MD for Avaya and John Turgeon, VP & Chief Technologist for Software Defined Architecture, Worldwide Sales at Avaya throw light on the last 18 months of Avaya transformation journey and roadmap