An explosion of innovation in the unified communications and customer experience markets over recent years has given businesses access to more technology than ever to stay connected.
This trend will often mean buying technology from more than one vendor, which can become complicated if not managed correctly.
Avaya takes a proactive approach to collaboration with other vendors. Its Experience Builders ecosystem—comprised of Avaya customers, partners, and experts—aims to bring together resources, skill sets, and technologies into a single framework, with the Avaya OneCloud experience platform at the centre.
The aim is to make it easier to help craft solutions for all types of problems, from simple to complex.
According to Avaya Alliances Manager Rick Hawkes, the emergence of the Experience Builders initiative was driven entirely by customer demand – and the onset of the experience economy.
“Our customers are realizing that they’re competing on the experiences they deliver. And that, to deliver great customer experiences, they need to look at the entire experience spectrum – including employee-, user- and multi-experience. And with so many experiences across that spectrum to consider, businesses are finding that they need to create very specific use cases, very quickly. That forces you to adopt a platform approach to the technology you’re using to enable communications,” he said, speaking to UC Today.
“The good news for our customers is that we’re very good at providing that platform, whether its on-prem hybrid or cloud. And we have an incredibly rich ecosystem with which to create those use cases. So Avaya OneCloud is fast-becoming this one-stop shop that enables customers to very quickly address their requirements.”
Creating this one-stop shop also makes it simpler for channel partners and customers to procure complete solutions.
Avaya goes to great lengths to ensure that the partnerships are not merely bolt-ons, with little integration. Instead, Avaya and its alliance partners will work jointly on the go-to-market proposition and ensure their respective products are stitched together in a coherent solution.
The partnerships can take varying forms but all models see Avaya and the partner invest in each other’s technology.
Best of Breed
The ultimate goal of Avaya’s ecosystem approach is to make sure the customer gets the best solution possible.
Taking the Google example – very few companies are in a position to invest as much money into speech recognition as Google. Rather than developing a competing product, Avaya brings Google’s technology into its ecosystem and invests smartly to integrate the speech recognition into its platform.
But if, for whatever reason, a customer has a use case that demands an AI solution from, say, Nuance, Avaya OneCloud can support that, too.
“We create a very deep R&D pool between us all,” Hawkes said. “Typically, we work with platforms that are very safe and reliable, and then we look for niche plays that add huge value for customers.
“We want our partners and customers to be able to consume the complete transformational story, which is what they’re really looking for.”
