Avaya's CEO Alan Masarek spoke to UC Today's David Dungay at Gitex Global about the "extraordinary progress" it has made over the past 14 months.
Masarek took over from Avaya's former CEO, Jim Chirico, on August 1, 2022, guiding the company through its subsequent Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a renewed vision centring around "innovation without disruption".
Through his time at the helm, Masarek says the company has taken on thousands of new customers, as well as achieving excellent results in terms of its financial and business restructuring.
Masarek also revealed it has made new senior hires and plans to release "greater and greater" functionality as part of its investment strategy.
Alan Masarek, Avaya's Chief Executive Officer, reflected on the progress Avaya has made despite the financial challenges it has faced:
I announced recently that over the course of this very noisy year… we still added thousands of net new customers, over a thousand a quarter generally.
"It is a really good story in terms of how quickly we've been able to demonstrate that we're the vendor to take care of the base and also add net new [customers] along the way."
Avaya's 14 months of "extraordinary progress", which have resulted in a wave of new customers, stem from a fresh approach to business and finances that has been made possible with its clean financial slate.
Masarek explained that its finances were being used to invest in products, talent, engineering, and its customers.
From a product perspective, it is already "the best in the world" when it comes to voice, Masarek asserts. On top of that, it is now adding chat, social and digital channels, and various AI utilities.
Enterprise customers will be able to move to voice without changing their proprietary call flows, moving it as a dedicated instance in the public cloud instead.
This capability embodies Avaya's "innovation with disruption" ambition, innovating on top via the cloud without disrupting the innovation beneath. This approach is particularly beneficial for large, complex, sensitive, or highly regulated organisations, Masarak says.
