Avaya Users: From Contingencies to Strategic PlanningAvaya Users: From Contingencies to Strategic Planning
This is an interesting and excellent time to be an enterprise customer.
January 26, 2018
As covered on No Jitter and elsewhere recently, since mid-December 2017, Avaya has installed new corporate leadership, exited bankruptcy, reduced its debt and interest expenses, gone public, and is busy planning a number of major product announcements for next week at Avaya Engage, the annual user and partner conference it co-hosts with the International Avaya Users Group. This is all positive news, but still we're left asking, "What's next for the Avaya customer base, and what does the company offer new prospects?"
A Great Moment in Time...
From my vantage point, this is an excellent moment in time, now that Avaya has exited from Chapter 11, to look at your current UC and contact center environments with an eye on where you might be able to take advantage of Avaya's new lease on life. If you're nearing end of support for an Avaya or competitive UC product from vendors such as Cisco, Genesys, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC, Unify -- or even have legacy Centrex at end of support -- now is time to take advantage. There are several reasons for this:
Avaya is planning on making major announcements at Avaya Engage, introducing new technologies. Post show will be a good time to evaluate how these offerings can benefit your organization.
I believe Avaya will offer strong incentives to stay with the company and upgrade within the product family, so checking into what it might be offering would be worth your while.
You can anticipate that competitors will offer similar programs, as they have for the last 12 months; expect this to continue for the foreseeable future.
Expect Avaya to be aggressive in trying to win new enterprise business from its competitors now that it's out from the shadow of its bankruptcy.
Availability of Newer Applications
As UC continues to evolve, newer technologies have extended its reach in the commercial and consumer markets. Some of these technologies include:
Communications platform as a service -- CPaaS enables integration of real-time applications into UC and contact center platforms, creating a powerful set of tools for delivering enhanced customer experience
Artificial intelligence -- AI use will increase exponentially with integration to UC and contact center applications for enhancing the customer experience; among these applications are self-service/chat bots, smart routing, contact center agent augmentation, enhanced workforce optimization, and tracking of contextual customer data
Internet of Things -- IoT data can be integrated with UC and contact center applications for real-time trouble reporting and device awareness; expect IoT integrations to proliferate
Workstream communications -- Workstream communications, or team collaboration, has entered the fold with offerings from Unify (Circuit), Cisco (Spark), Microsoft (Teams), and Slack among others, facilitating an integrated approach to collaboration
Biometrics -- Real-time facial recognition sensors can add to concierge services, enhanced security access, and integration to UC applications for chat, video, and more
Software-defined WAN -- SD-WAN delivers a next-gen level of WAN for any enterprise, at 20 to 50% cost less than a traditional WAN. Using both private and public access, security, and load balancing between circuits, SD-WAN promises more bandwidth and real-time access across multiple sites at nominal cost
Big data -- Big data will add a new dimension to customer engagement through advanced analytics and visualizations that help deliver actionable customer insight in real time
Together these areas will add up to in excess of $296 billion between 2020 to 2025 (depending on the category) without IoT, and another $6.2 trillion for IoT by 2025, according to multiple sources.
Technologies Now Mainstream
Unified communications -- Many enterprises have begun to embrace the full UC suite, starting with easy areas such as LDAP directories and unified messaging, then expanding to audioconferencing, collaboration, presence, ad-hoc videoconferencing, IM/chat, and integration with third-party APIs.
Multichannel contact centers -- We're now in the "Age of Customer Experience," as shown in a recent Gartner survey in which 89% of those surveyed said their organizations are focused on customer experience. This new era is driving the need for better contact center SLAs and better multichannel tools, including Web chat, email, video, collaboration appointment reminders, social media, chat bots, and CPaaS integration, among others.
Videoconferencing going mainstream -- Video is going viral, with the market expected to reach $7.8 billion by 2023, according to Transparency Market Research. This includes videoconferencing rooms, cloud-based videoconferencing, video streaming, video training and recording, and multichannel video in the contact center. New legislation specific to health care is helping facilitate the use of videoconferencing, for example. Health care kiosks at drugstores and entries to hospitals are now going mainstream, and video telemedicine appointments are now available, reimbursable to physicians and health care providers by insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid.
The UC cloud -- Some enterprises simply don't want to manage complex UC and contact center infrastructure any longer, and are beginning to accept UC and contact center cloud services as real alternatives to premises deployments. In my experience, cloud costs are anywhere from 40% to 100% more than an equivalent premises solution, and security and privacy are concerns, too, especially in health care and financials service sectors.
Mobility -- Mobile devices have been around forever, but the acceptance of twinning to the desktop and full UC suite on a smart device have now gone mainstream. Specific to health care, mobile device applications now include the full UC suite with extensions for real-time prescriptions, access to patient monitoring, scoring the patient experience, and IM/presence chat functions connecting physicians.
Continue to Page 2: Developing Your Strategic Plan
Continued from Page 1
Developing Your Strategic Plan
Enterprise users need to consider a strategic plan for their underlying IT, UC, and contact center infrastructures. The plan's objectives should include the following:
Managing costs for your current Avaya (or other vendor) infrastructure -- consider capital costs, savings, ongoing costs, and managed costs
Minimizing product end of life and risks to the organization (any vendor)
Conducting due diligence for best "fit" for organization
Helping facilitate funding for product replacement
Staying competitive by leveraging evolving market technology
Transitioning to the latest available technology that will help differentiate your organization
Your strategic plan involves a specific nine-step process, as follows:
Identify and review your corporate and it strategic plans. Identifying and reviewing your corporate and IT strategic plans will help zero in on and facilitate where your enterprise is headed in the next two to five years, and will help tie in what technologies may make most sense for your organization. For example, if delivery of retail products is critical to your customer experience, than a CPaaS application with real-time tracking may make a lot of sense for your enterprise.
Identify technologies that should be on your roadmap. Considering the technologies I've shared in this post (and beyond), identify which may be most practical for your organization. Do you need the UC or contact center cloud, mobile UC, CPaaS, or another?
Closely watch the latest announcements from Avaya (and others) at Avaya Engage and other events. Review the latest announcements from Avaya and determine how they could benefit your organization. If an announcement for a particular technology is significant, you can baseline that to your internal plans and see how they might tie in. Also consider major announcements about end-user support, whether direct or through a VAR, and determine if that aligns with your expectations.
Obtain an nondisclosure agreement (NDA) from Avaya and go deep (12 to 24 months if possible). Under an NDA, obtain Avaya's plans for evolving its UC, contact center, and adjacent technologies. This will provide perspective to use in aligning with your organization's plans. Ask when particular releases, features, and functions will be available. Ask if you can include such releases as a part of your upgrade platform. Ask what incentives Avaya will provide if you migrate from your premises platform to a cloud service.
Build a pro-forma specification of your short- (12 months) and medium-term (24 to 36 months) requirements for budgetary purposes. Building pro-forma specifications for 12 to 36 months out will provide Avaya (and others) with enough financial detail for requesting CAPEX or OPEX budgetary requests for next the fiscal year and two years out.
Ensure your current infrastructure is UC ready. Make sure all intra- and interbuilding cabling, Layer 3 switching, and WAN bandwidth is ready for UC, including all voice, video, data, and now extended technologies that require additional bandwidth. By 2020, 82% of all IP traffic will be video, Cisco has said. HD video calls will add approximately 1 Mbps of bandwidth per call over the data (depending on codec) -- i.e., 100 concurrent calls will add 100 Mbps. Voice calls at G.711 or G.722 HD codecs, placing video at 11 times the volume of a voice call. Expect video to add significant WAN bandwidth requirements.
Identify areas for ROI. Many of our clients grab onto the notion of balancing any CAPEX or increased OPEX costs with ROI opportunities. We were able to save one client $1.5 million annually by leveraging SIP trunking. In another instance we identified $8.2 million annually in hard-dollar savings for a $10 million contact center opportunity, paying for the system in less than 15 months. In a third case, we identified $3.2 million savings annually for a $2 million annual UC and contact center cloud spend. Providing these kind of numbers to executive management goes a long way in getting approvals for any major CAPEX or OPEX investments for the same of next fiscal year. A spreadsheet showing all costs and hard-dollar savings -- "net net" costs -- seven to 10 years out can be a real asset for executive management. A recent SD-WAN use case with SIP trunking savings and POTS savings showed the client how it could create a fully redundant network across 500+ sites, spend $78 million over 10 years, and save $77 million or a net $1 million for an entire UC upgrade/replacement and replacement of a legacy MPLS network.
Document your plan, and then present it to and get buy-in from CXO management. Document your plan in the form of a report and PowerPoint presentation for management. Consider your organization's objectives, capital/non-capital monies available, options available, project objectives, any risks associated with each, the general timeline for implementation, etc. Provide enough documentation and support to help management leverage the funding needed for a system upgrade or replacement. Develop a timeline, as a part of your plan, to include Avaya announcements; your due diligence; getting the assistance of industry experts when necessary; logistics required for a new system migration and UC readiness; one-time and ongoing costs, and use of the newer technologies available that can 1) facilitate your organization's effectiveness, and 2) differentiate your organization from others; and one-time and ongoing costs.
When ready to purchase/upgrade, go out for bid. This is an excellent time to be an Avaya customer (or other vendor if Avaya is also bidding). When making a significant capital purchase or OPEX increase (cloud), a competitive bid via an RFP will always facilitate best pricing from any vendor. If you're an Avaya customer get two to three other bids. If you're a Cisco, NEC, Unify, Mitel, Microsoft, legacy Centrex, or other customer, get two to three bids and include Avaya in the process. Your due diligence and a strong, comprehensive RFP will give you the results you'll need in determining what services, technologies, and costs are available that will match closest to you and your organizations' vision and culture. I expect Avaya's pricing to be very aggressive over the next 12 to 24 months as it seeks to win back market share, and I would expect other vendors to be price-driven to some degree as well. There could be an all-out price war taking place and any enterprise customer can take advantage of such.
Summary and Conclusions
This is an interesting and excellent time to be an enterprise customer. With the dynamics of mergers and acquisitions, the rise of the UC cloud, CPaaS, APIs, big data, AI, video going mainstream, and the new Age of Customer Experience, leveraging new technologies and integrating them with your culture to enhance your competitive edge are all critical considerations for enterprise customers.
It's good to see that Avaya has made it through the bankruptcy period. During that period, as expected, there was some erosion of Avaya's base. But it's a new day at Avaya and, as shared in an earlier No Jitter post by editor Beth Schultz, I would include Avaya in any procurement RFP while closely watching its financials and growth over the next six to 12 months.
We need a competitive environment with the many mergers and acquisitions that took place in 2017, as choices are always best for any enterprise organization. I look forward to including Avaya as a possible solution provider for our clients.
Hear more from Avaya during an Industry Vision Address at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Early Bird Pricing or get a free Expo Plus pass.
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