Two years ago, Avaya was fighting to earn back trust. The company had just come through a 2023 restructuring as a private business. Alan Masarek had left as CEO. Patrick Dennis arrived with a clear brief: stabilise the vendor and rebuild customer confidence. For years, the market had written Avaya off as a legacy PBX vendor. Even so, Dennis largely delivered. He launched the Avaya Infinity and Nexus platforms and turned Avaya into a genuine AI-era contact centre option. Now, with that foundation in place, the board has decided someone else should build on it.
Avaya confirmed on 3 August that Jeff Clarke will take over as CEO. Dennis moves into the newly created Executive Chair role. That makes three CEO changes in four years, a fast pace of turnover. For two years, Avaya has been asking large enterprise and public sector buyers to trust its stability.
Patrick Bartels, Chair of Avaya’s Board of Directors, credited Dennis with deepening customer relationships and launching Infinity and Nexus. He also pointed to improved financial performance during Dennis’s tenure. Still, the board is framing this handover as a move made from strength.
Who Is Jeff Clarke? Avaya’s New CEO Profile
Clarke joins from Insurity, a cloud-based insurance software provider, where he spent close to 18 months as CEO. Before that, he led Doxim and Travelport, also as CEO. Further back, his career sits mostly on the operational and financial side of the business. He was Chief Operating Officer at CA Technologies and Executive Vice President of Global Operations at Hewlett-Packard. Earlier still, he was Chief Financial Officer at Compaq Computer. He has also served on the boards of Autodesk, Red Hat, Orbitz and Compuware.
Clarke said Avaya’s future depends on investing in innovation:
“The strongest, most enduring companies are those that invest in innovation.”
He added that he wants to build on Avaya’s existing foundation in enterprise communications.
What Jeff Clarke Means for Avaya’s Contact Centre and AI Strategy
That background is exactly what makes the appointment interesting. Dennis spent his tenure arguing that enterprises don’t need to rip out existing infrastructure to modernise their contact centres. Infinity gave them a hybrid path into AI-driven customer experience. Nexus, meanwhile, brought cloud resiliency to regulated, mission-critical environments like healthcare, government and finance. Avaya now has to defend that pitch against cloud-native rivals and the industry’s shift toward agentic AI. Clarke built his own record on operational discipline, not product bets.
That’s the read Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, has taken on the appointment. He said:
“Appointing an executive with deep legacy tech roots signals a pivot toward balance-sheet management, margin preservation, and customer retention.
“While Clarke’s operational discipline will reassure risk-averse enterprise clients, it positions Avaya defensively.”
Clarke can keep building on Infinity and Nexus, or pull back toward margin protection. Either way, that choice will shape Avaya’s next round of enterprise contact centre deals.
