From bankruptcy announcements to the retirement of enterprise social networking services, here are some extracts from popular news stories this week.
Avaya Files for Bankruptcy
Avaya has filed for bankruptcy to wipe off more than 75 percent of its $3.4bn debt.
The Chapter 11 filing in the US brings clarity to an uncertain saga that has rumbled on for months amid Avaya’s stalled move to the cloud.
The vendor characterised the bankruptcy as an “action to accelerate transformation and fortify capital structure”.
As part of the move, Avaya has secured $780m in new financing and plans to restructure its balance sheet.
Alan Masarek, Chief Executive Officer at Avaya, said: “I joined Avaya to help unlock the power of its iconic brand, global customer footprint, massive partner ecosystem, large-scale communications deployments and outstanding team.
“Building on this tremendous foundation, we have made significant progress pioneering an ambitious business model transformation, establishing a competitive product strategy for our subscription and cloud-delivered services and implementing operational efficiencies to better serve the Avaya ecosystem.
“Strengthening Avaya’s capital structure is a critical step to fully realize our transformation, and we are excited to move ahead as a well-capitalized company with one of the strongest balance sheets in our industry that includes substantial cash to invest in our own success.”
Avaya insisted that the service it provides to customers and partners will not be impaired during the process, which it expects to take between 60 and 90 days. It claims its plan is supported by more than 90 percent of its existing secured lenders.
The move will also see Avaya delist from the New York Stock Exchange.
RingCentral is ‘Executing Well in the Current Environment’ to Drive Growth – CEO
RingCentral’s total revenue grew by 25 percent throughout the fiscal year 2022, with revenue up from $1.59bn in 2021 to $1.99bn in 2022.
The company revealed the figure during its fourth quarter FY 2022 earnings call, in which the company reported a revenue of $525 million, representing 17 percent year-over-year growth.
Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, commented: “We are in a select category of SaaS companies with over $2 billion of recurring revenue, and our Q4 results reflect our ability to deliver healthy growth and increasing profitability as we continue to scale.
“We are executing well in the current environment given our product leadership, which provides customers with the market’s leading UCaaS platform, as well as an integrated CCaaS solution.”
Although with its earnings, RingCentral has also announced in recent days it is extending its strategic partnership with Avaya and that it is also entering a new one with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Both partnerships are designed to help organisations accelerate their journeys to the cloud for communications and collaboration.
AWS
RingCentral’s new Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS will aim to help organisations accelerate their cloud journeys and transform their employee and customer communications.
The partnership is a multi-year agreement that will see AWS offer RingCentral Message Video Phone (MVP) and RingCentral Contact Centre to its customers.
The two companies have stated they will work on delivering vertical solutions with end-to-end cloud migration for businesses in healthcare, financial services, retail, education, and the public sector.
Cisco’s Collaboration Sales Drop by 10%
Cisco has reported that revenue for the business branch that houses Webex has fallen by ten percent.
The figures were revealed during the company’s second-quarter earnings call of fiscal year 2023, in which it was reported that Cisco earned $13.6bn in revenue, up seven percent year-over-year.
The decline in collaboration sales has been put down to a drop in meetings and collaboration devices, according to Scott Herren, Chief Financial Officer, Cisco.
He commented: “Internet for the Future was down 1%, driven by declines in optical and Edge. We saw growth in our Cisco 8000 offering and double-digit growth in web scale.
“Collaboration was down 10%, driven by declines in meetings and collaboration devices, slightly offset by growth in contact center.
“End-to-end security was up 7%, driven by our unified threat management and zero trust offerings.”
Q2 FY 2023 is the second quarter running that Cisco has seen a drop in collaboration sales, with a two percent decline in Q1.
Herran declared that the drop in Q1 was again down to a decline in meetings, which he said had been “partially offset by a growth in calling”.
