Avaya has continued its rapid journey to the cloud with a host of updates to its Spaces workstream collaboration app.
The app, built on the vendor’s Communications Platform as a Service offering – Avaya OneCloud Cloud CPaaS – now allows businesses to connect workstream collaboration capabilities with existing enterprise telephony, forming a unified, all-in-one solution.
Avaya said that its platform gives the power of cloud-based collaboration tools to businesses that still have legacy comms infrastructure.
Research from MZA recently found that 76 of business users still rely on the traditional PBX environment for their calling, while operating standalone modern collaboration technology. Avaya says it can help bridge this gap.
Anthony Bartolo, Chief Product Officer at Avaya, said: “We designed Avaya Spaces to be an immersive collaboration platform that supports the composable enterprise, enabling organisations to move at the speed of their customers and employees.
“Businesses are adapting and scaling faster to meet the needs of the experience economy by shifting from monolithic software to more agile, services-based applications, and Avaya Spaces uniquely enables this leap forward.
“Avaya Spaces users also benefit from some of the most advanced, cloud-based AI as well as a client-less architecture for an exceptional and easy-to-use experience”
Avaya Spaces has played a critical role in Avaya’s transformation from a traditional comms provider to an as-a-service company.
Less than a year after its introduction, the platform was flagged by Gartner in Oct 2020 as Niche Player in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. Gartner defines ‘Meeting Solutions’ as offerings that “blend communications, collaboration and content sharing to enable virtual meeting scenarios to satisfy a variety of use cases.”
Avaya says Spaces is also one of the company’s best examples of the capabilities of its CPaaS platform, which it says enables a business to tap into “unlimited” abilities to integrate communications with business apps and tools.
Online learning platform provider Toolwire is building on top of the CPaaS solution to provide a more innovative offering to customers – particularly at a time when more learning is being done remotely than ever before.
John Valencia, CEO at Toolwire, said: “The past year has demonstrated the need for better remote learning solutions, and Toolwire is creating new and more powerful tools for our customers – thanks to Avaya.
“With its CPaaS architecture, Avaya Spaces is a tremendous collaboration platform for us to build upon, enabling us to provide universities and companies of any size with the collaboration capabilities they require to create breakthrough experiences and achieve their desired level of digital transformation – one learner at a time.”
Avaya said that Spaces has seen strong adoption since its launch last year. The platform made its UK debut last March and has seen a number of updates rolled out since.
Spaces has quickly taken a seat at the top table with other industry-leading platforms and was recently recognised as a Strong Performer in the Frost & Sullivan Frost Radar for Cloud Meetings and Team Collaboration Services 2020 report.
Alaa Sayed, Industry Director for ICT at Frost & Sullivan, said: “In the past year Avaya Spaces has seen rapid growth in users and in new capabilities, delivering a modern and engaging user experience, high video quality, extensive security measures, and a large ecosystem of partners extending cloud and AI capabilities.
“Spaces provides more than video conferencing, with an array of always-on features including persistent messaging, file and content sharing, virtual personal meeting rooms, task management, and more”
Avaya announced its quarterly numbers last month, with cloud revenue equating for one-third of revenue, up from just 18 per cent a year ago. Annualised recurring revenue for the vendor’s OneCloud comms ecosystem rocketed 38 per cent sequentially to $262m.
