Avaya has reported buoyant trading figures driven by the development of its cloud business.
Sales for the quarter ending 31 December 2020 climbed four per cent year on year to $743m.
Cloud revenue equated to 34 per cent of the total figure ($252.6m), up from 18 per cent a year ago, while annualised recurring revenue for the vendor’s OneCloud comms ecosystem rocketed 38 per cent sequentially to $262m.
Jim Chirico, CEO at Avaya, credited the vendor’s growing cloud arm for the growth across the board.
“We have worked hard and structurally improved the business on a number of fronts and it shows in our numbers,” he said on an earnings call with investors.
“We’ve executed on a series of important initiatives and focused our efforts, time and investments to redefine Avaya as a cloud company”
“This is remarkable progress in just one year and [the cloud business] remains on track to be a $1bn business by year-end – further proof that we are on the right trajectory.”
Chirico highlighted the number of large contracts that Avaya won in the quarter. He said the vendor signed 119 deals with a value greater than $1m – 14 of which were greater than $5m; six were greater than $10m; and three were greater than $25m.
The quarter also saw Avaya sign over 1,600 new logos, “displacing a significant number of competitors,” Chirico added.
Avaya claims to have sold around $565m total contract value in subscriptions.
On Cloud Office, it said that the number of customers doubled in the last quarter alone. Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral launched last year.
In the contact centre space, the CEO said bookings have grown sequentially over the last four quarters and are now up 40 per cent on a trailing four-quarter base. Q1 was the highest booking quarter the vendor has seen over the last four years.
He added that the firm has been increasing the size of its partner base to expand its reach in CC, and has also been integrating AI from Google, Amazon and its own conversational intelligence into its solutions.
CPaaS has also become “an increasingly powerful differentiator” for Avaya, Chirico claimed, highlighting how the platform has been used in solutions around contact tracing and vaccination booking to combat COVID.
Chirico said that, overall, the results reflect the performance of “the new Avaya”.
“It’s really a manifestation of what we started a couple of years ago, down this deliberate path to reignite our innovation engine and bringing Avaya, if you will, to return to relevance in the enterprise market space,” he said.
“The great news is that effort is really starting to now feel the impact and as shown in the numbers, and I think our ARR is a real reflection to that.
“Our capability to deliver what I’ll call significant and attractive offers and more importantly to be having the capability to, one, deliver those, and secondly to compete within the marketplace really shows what we call ‘the new Avaya’.”
