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.
Customers may also be drawn to Avaya’s product offering because they are able to acquire a comprehensive solution and AI experience platform with proprietary hardware and service, plus support frameworks. Contact centre and unified communications can be brought together, resulting in a full customer and employee solution.
Avaya has also made additional hires who will be publicly announced within the next two months, according to Masarek.
The new hires will follow the recent additions of a chief financial officer, chief product officer, and chief marketing officer to its C-Suite in June this year.
Masarek offered his perspective on the future of Avaya: “It gives me a great sense of confidence that customers are responding to (Avaya’s transformation and) partners are responding to it.
“I think you’re going to see very quickly Avaya restore to a net grower while delivering good financial results on the bottom line.
Masarek continued:
“The financial disruption that we had before obviously created a great deal of noise but that is well behind us now… our best days are absolutely in front of us.”
You can watch the full interview with Alan Masarek, which took place at Gitex Global. This year, Gitex Global is being held between 16 – 20 October, “bringing together the world’s most innovative enterprises”, with more than 5,000 exhibitors from over 170 countries.
