3171T test - Avaya Enterprise Team Engagement Solutions (APDS) Updated: 2023

Kathy Gibson reports from Gitex – Avaya has successfully emerged from bankruptcy to challenge for supremacy in the burgeoning customer experience (CX) market.

There’s a new spirit of optimism and passion at the company, with CEO Alan Masarek leading the charge.

“There is this tremendous trend towards customer experience,” he says. “And communications companies have to be driving it.”

Masarek believes Avaya is in pole position to do just this: “The company has a great asset base. It is already a leader in the contact centre and unified communications market, with some huge customers.

“In addition, it is an iconic brand – and it has global distribution.”

To seize the opportunity presented by the growing CX segment, Masarek says Avaya needed to complement its market leadership position with financial and business restructuring.

The company entered Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code in February this year, and emerged less than three months later, in May, with a very positive financial story to tell.

The $3,9-billion in debt has been written down to $800-million, with $650-million of that available as cash.

That achievement was possible because creditors bought into Avaya’s strategy and it’s vision for CX, Masarek says, and they believe that their returns will be greater on the equity than the debt.

Avaya has also delisted, so it’s been able to do its cost restructuring and operational changes as a private company.

This doesn’t mean its movements are shrouded in secrecy, though. “I like the transparency of being public,” Masarek says. “But our constituent is not Wall Street; it is our customers. So we do an annual report for our customers that brings the new company to life and lets us communicate with a level of transparency.”

This interactive report is live on the Avaya site.

In restructuring the business, the company has identified the directions its product development needs to take, and rationalised a number of older product lines, including some that harked back to the Nortel days.

“When you set an unambiguous product strategy on the one hand, and rationalise the product set on the other, the engineering group can focus and deliver on the roadmap quickly,” Masarek says.

“We have also become transparent about our plans and published our roadmap to demonstrate our reliability. We needed to do this to reclaim the confidence of our customers.”

Concurrently with that restructuring, Avaya has right-sized the cost structures and made several operational changes, with the result that the company’s profitability has been restored.

This is key, says Masarek: Avaya has traditionally reported good revenues, but profitability was lacking. Now, not only has it restored free cash flow but turns in a positive performance.

At the same time as the financials and product sets were being brought into line, the organisation was being restructured to support the strategy, and work is underway to revitalise the company culture.

“First we reset the go-to-market strategy in a way that we think is unique among our competitors,” Masarek says. “And this is to build it around our customers.”

Avaya counts some of the world’s largest organisations as its customers, with many of them on the books for as much as two decades, when the company was variously AT&T, Lucent and Nortel.

“These are large deployments,” Masarek points out. “And that customer set is modernising operations and moving to the cloud – but not like the SME world is. Theirs’ is much more of a gradual migration. So our go-to-market strategy of innovation without disruption is key.”

Avaya’s traditional solution set is in on-premise kit; its more latest offerings in the cloud are desirable but it’s simply not possible for large enterprises with massive investments in legacy equipment to do a rip-and-replace.

Avaya’s hybrid cloud options let customers move at their pace. They can layer their on-premise installations with innovations from the Avaya Experience Platform, allowing customers to connect how they want and giving employees the tools to meet customers’ needs.

When moving to the cloud, customers can first transition their current on-premises platform to Avaya Enterprise Cloud, keeping their familiar Avaya solution such as Avaya Aura Platform and Avaya Call Centre Elite in a dedicated instance on Microsoft Azure. That way there’s no disruption for customers and no training needed for employees. From there, they can easily modernise the customer experience by adding Avaya Experience Platform capabilities.

The Avaya Experience Platform helps organisations to maximise contact centre performance and connect to customers with seamless experiences across channels including voice, video, chat, messaging, and more.

Avaya Enterprise Cloud is essentially the legacy Avaya platform, running in a secure, flexible and personal cloud. Customers can expand their contact centre and unified communications as needed to extend their capabilities and communication channels.

“Customer service is how our enterprise customers compete,” Masaryk stresses, pointing out that CX needs to permeate the whole company.

“Where the industry is going, and where we are driving, is for CX to happen throughout the organisation in an omni-channel way. You can no longer think of solutions as just UC for the knowledge workers and contact centre solutions for the agents. We are not building yesteryear’s solutions, but permeating CX throughout the organisation.”

With very little competition in the on-premise space, Masarek believes Avaya has a good story to tell in helping the large, complex and sensitive industries customer set to transition to hybrid and full cloud when they are ready to do so.

“In almost any enterprise software category, large companies do not do a hot cut-over for anything,” Masarek says. “They don’t want to forklift their installation, but they do want to modernise. Whether they want to stay on-premise of jump all the way to multi-tenanted cloud – or any of the baby steps inbetween – we can do that with them.

“It’s about letting them choose their own journey, moving at their own pace.”
In this, Masarek believes Avaya has found its position in the market, with very little competition. “And this has resonated well with customers and partners.”

The final step in the company’s rebirth has been to revitalise the culture. Masarek has made a start in this direction by adding new executives in key functions and focusing on the recruitment and retention of talent throughout the organisation.

He is well aware of how difficult this turnaround can be, but tells believes culture is hugely important and so has set in place a strategy to achieve the change.

“First, we want to turn the company into a destination place to work, which is all about having a culture that attracts and retains the best talent. We will do this through rewards and recognition, through the corporate culture itself and through growth and development.”

Culture means a variety of things, he adds, from sustainability, inclusivity, the workspace themselves, staff wellbeing and inviting mutual respect.

“Being a destination place to work is fundamentally a personal thing and means different things to different people,” he adds, “However, it reflects itself in quantitative measures that we can track and ensure they Strengthen over time.

“But changing the culture only works if you walk the walk, and go after the opportunities that people believe in. People want to win, so they will get behind the strategy.”

Avaya has given itself eight quarters to reinvent itself and, five quarters in, Masarek is confident the company is making good progress.

“There is a sense of optimism – and the company feels different to me; people believe in it.”

Who is Alan Masarek?

Alan Masarek came out of retirement 14 months ago to lead the restructuring of Avaya.

His most latest position before that was a CEO and director of Vonage Holdings, from 2014 to June 2020. He led Vonage through its transformation from a VoIP-based residential phone provider into a global enterprise cloud communications company.

Before that, he was a director at Google from 2012, following Google’s acquisition of Quickoffice, where Masarek was the co-founder and CEO. Having set up the company in 2007, Quickoffice had 26-million registered users by the time Google took it over.

Etisalat Joins Forces with Avaya to Provide End-to-End Enterprise Telephony Solutions and Enhanced services
 
The leading service provider in the region Etisalat and Avaya – the global leader in enterprise communications have announced today a partnership to provide enterprise IP telephony, unified communications and enhanced maintenance services which will deliver powerful productivity and cost saving benefits to medium & large companies in the UAE.
 
With today’s converged voice and data networks, companies discovering a whole new world of integrated business communications. The opportunities and impacts are clearly needed to keep a competitive edge, achieve higher operational performance and productivity and overall organizational effectiveness. Sometimes the challenges of maintaining and managing critical communication applications and multi-vendor systems require a fresh look at support options. It is for this reason; Etisalat and Avaya will offer a full menu of enhanced support services to assist businesses with these challenges. Choices range from initial design, site installation, configuration, testing as well as 24/7 X 365 proactive monitoring and maintenance of Avaya technology based solutions.
 
As industry analyst NICK LIPPIS explains: “services providers have the skill sets to troubleshoot a converged network and even prevent problems before they impact network performance, a good maintenance services provider delivers a value that probe for lower costs, increased reliability, security and help a business avoid communications down time”.
 
 
“Etisalat has identified an opportunity in the market to comprehensively manage the telephony needs of the region’s enterprises, enabling them to reap the benefits of the latest communications solutions from Avaya without the complexity of deploying and managing these networks themselves,” said Abdulla Hashim, VP, Enterprise Solutions, Etisalat.
 
 “Partnering with Etisalat provides Avaya with the opportunity to assist a broader range of enterprise customers in the UAE by helping them to increase productivity, decrease costs, and achieve greater flexibility with their communications networks,” explained Nidal Abou-Ltaif, Area VP for Avaya in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey, who added “Avaya’s partnership with the region’s largest service provider will deliver maximum availability and superior performance to Etisalat enterprise customers who can then focus on their core business strategies knowing that their communications networks are secure and reliable.”

At times everybody gets down in the dumps, but if life is consistently getting you down and your lows are making it hard to function, you may be depressed. Find out whether your slump is critical with this depression test. This assessment is designed to determine whether you presently have, or are at risk for developing a depressive disorder, along with assessing whether your mindset makes you more prone to depression. Examine the following statements and indicate how well it describes you or how often you feel that way.

This test is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or for the treatment of any health condition. If you would like to seek the advice of a licensed mental health professional you can search Psychology Today's directory here.

From early on in life, we develop an attachment to our primary caregivers that tends to remain constant. This attachment style has a profound effect not only on our emotional development, but also upon the health of our relationships. The main attachment styles covered in this test are Secure, Anxious-Ambivalent, Dismissive-Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant, Dependent, and Codependent. Find out what your style is and how it affects your relationships by taking this test.

Examine the following statements and indicate to what degree they are true of you. In order to receive the most accurate results, please answer each question as honestly as possible.

This test is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or for the treatment of any health condition. If you would like to seek the advice of a licensed mental health professional you can search Psychology Today's directory here.

The continuous delivery management company Plutora wants to streamline enterprise test environment management in its latest release. The company announced the new CD Pipeline functionality as part of its Plutora Environments solution.

Plutora Environments is a pre-production environment management solution for enterprise IT. The new functionality enables teams to manage multiple test environments as well as provide visibility, traceability and control.

According to the company, many businesses are wasting billions of dollars due to poor test environment management. Software is changing the world of enterprise, meaning businesses who are not traditionally software companies have to now balance a mixture of technology and software development methodologies as well as speed and control, Plutora explained. What ends up happening is a lack of visibility into specialized tools that results in an inability to assess and reduce schedule risk across multiple pipelines. This leads to an inability to identify new code changes, and inefficient handoffs from development to test.

“Enterprise test environment management encompasses a complex range of components and architectures, but traditionally there has not been a solution that provides a consolidated view of environment availability, usage and configuration detail. Without this view, large enterprise customers who can have up to thousands of test environments, struggled to avoid conflicts and mis-configurations, leading to significant financial loss for the business, which can total billions of dollars yearly,” the company said in a statement.

The new CD Pipeline functionality is designed for quality assurance teams, test environment managers and release managers.

For QA teams and test environment managers, the solution enables teams to associate new code commits with features or fixes; ensure accuracy to test coverage; trace updated code to fix defects; assign test cases; and automatically link change requests to test cases.

For release managers, CD Pipeline provides the ability to monitor product quality, highlights how new code is progressing, and provides traceability of test cases and results.

The three services above are our top choices for the best DNA test. But they weren't the only ones we tested. What follows are some additional options, none of which eclipsed the 23andMe, Ancestry or FamilyTreeDNA in any significant fashion. 

MyHeritage

MyHeritage offers a free tier of service that includes some basic family tree-building and access to excerpts of historical documents. It also includes a report of your genetic makeup across the company's 42 supported ethnicities, the identification of relatives and connections to them where possible. 

We found MyHeritage's user interface far less intuitive and more difficult to navigate than others. It's one of the few companies to offer a comprehensive research database of historical documents, DNA analysis and health screening -- we found the integration among them to be a bit clumsy. In 2018, MyHeritage committed a security breach, exposing the email addresses and hashed passwords of more than 92 million users.

Living DNA

LivingDNA divides its offerings in a different way than others. The $99 Full Ancestry DNA kit provides an overview of your ancestry in 150 geographical regions and information about maternal and paternal haplogroups and access to the company's genetic matching tool. The $120 "wellbeing package" includes reports about your physiological compatibility with vitamins, foods and exercise. And the $179 Wellbeing and Ancestry gives you all of it.

Despite. not selling or sharing data, the company has a very limited family match database; a company representative declined to deliver me a specific number but said that it contained less than 1 million profiles. So, if you're looking to identify and make connections with relatives, there are better choices in the market. 

Whole genome sequencing

There are a number of companies -- including Full Genomes, Veritas Genetics, Nebula Genomics and Dante Labs -- that can sequence all of your DNA, otherwise known as your genome. This level of analysis is appropriate for advanced users only. Not only is it expensive -- these tests can run into the thousands of dollars, in some cases -- it requires a sophisticated understanding of both genetics and a range of technical tools required to explore and interpret your results. The least expensive whole genome tests cost about $300. 

For most people, the main rationale for sequencing the whole genome is to dive deep into your genetic health outlook. You can glean your personal risk factors for diseases, drug sensitivities and your status as a carrier; that is, what you might pass on to your kids. All of these efforts can also be undertaken -- to a less intense degree -- with some of the more affordable options outlined above. We suggest starting with Nebula Genomics. You can also upload an existing DNA sequence from Ancestry or 23andMe's DNA database and get Nebula's reports at a reduced price. 

Ensuring smooth running is literally the business of oil and lubricants company Motul, and it is now applying this principle across its communications estate, looking to deliver “effortless” experiences for its customers and employees through a range of touchpoints after adopting a suite of cloud-based communications solutions.

Founded in 1853, Motul is a French company with an international footprint. It specialises in the formulation, production and distribution of high-performance lubricants for engines such as two-wheelers, cars and heavy-duty vehicles, as well as for its industrial activity through its Motul Tech entity. The company has a reputation for its capacity to provide state-of-the-art synthetic lubricants, introducing in 1971 the very first 100% synthetic multigrade lubricant, Motul 300V.

As part of its plan to create and track new key performance indicators (KPIs) that have helped the company evolve its customer service processes, Motul is now running the Avaya Experience Platform cloud contact centre solution to make it easier to connect the right agents with customers through voice, video, chat, messaging and more. This is integrated with Avaya Cloud Office by the RingCentral cloud-based communications solution, which enables more than 400 global employees to collaborate across borders.

The two solutions are fully integrated, enabling information to flow smoothly between the front and back offices. Agents are given improved access to subject matter experts, making it easier for Motul to resolve complex customer queries. Agents that have hybrid responsibilities between customer service and admin can navigate easily between the two solutions.

“Our business development relies heavily on our close relationship with our customers. And communications play a key role internally as well as externally. With Avaya Cloud Office and Avaya Experience Platform, we’re able to communicate and collaborate much more effectively,” explained Motul CIO Mathieu Blin.

“We were willing to switch to the cloud-based infrastructure for the features that we got in return. Giving our colleagues a single, unified platform that’s common across every office, in every geography, means we’re able to share information seamlessly and act on it quickly. Now, we have a strategic approach to Strengthen our customer experience, reinforce our competitivity and secure our success in the long term. We’re confident in the ability of Avaya’s technology to meet our customers’ contact preferences.”

As an existing Avaya customer, Motul was able to implement the cloud-based solutions without disruptive technology upgrades or extensive employee training, enabling the company to realise faster time to value from the new capabilities. Avaya Experience Platform also delivers advanced analytics, and reporting is said to have helped Motul create and track new KPIs that have helped the company evolve its customer service processes.

Avaya believes the solution’s ability to integrate easily into Motul’s customer relationship management applications has made the roll-out of these KPIs “pain-free”.

“Motul has thrived for over 150 years thanks to its culture of putting customer connection at the very heart of its drive for excellence,” said Nidal Abou-Ltaif, senior vice-president, global head of sales, and president of Avaya International. “We’re proud to be helping the company continue with its people-first values as its customers and workforce move into the digital realm.” 

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