Avaya repositions itself as cloud provider for unified communications

Unified communications vendor Avaya is rebranding its entire communications portfolio under the Avaya OneCloud name, effectively positioning itself as a cloud services provider.

Avaya OneCloud spans the entire Avaya product line, which is focused on contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS), unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS). Avaya offers a range of operational, consumption and commercial models that can be deployed on-premises as well as through Avaya’s private and public cloud offerings.

“Global organizations increasingly rely on us as they adapt to a work-from-anywhere world, and we are delivering our offerings in a more impactful way,” said Simon Harrison, Avaya senior vice president and chief marketing officer, in a statement. “Avaya OneCloud enables them to consume and deploy apps in the way they want, to achieve their ambitions and build their brands through improved experiences.”

Avaya is a spinoff from Lucent Technology. It was purchased by a private equity firm in 2007, which left it with a lot of debt. The company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2017, after which it sold off its hardware business and emerged from Chapter 11 as a public company. Since then it has been focused on three core lines of business.

Avaya OneCloud CCaaS provides customer and workforce engagement solutions to connect multiple touchpoints – including voice, video, chat, messaging, and social – while leveraging AI, insights, knowledge and resources from across an organization.

Avaya OneCloud UCaaS provides unified communications and team collaboration functions for employees to meet, message and collaborate.

Avaya OneCloud CPaaS provides an API for building communications-enabled applications with a platform that supports SMS, MMS, voice, messaging, and digital channels.

Avaya has dual offerings in the communications sector: Avaya Cloud Office and Avaya Spaces. Cloud Office was licensed from RingCentral in late 2019 because Avaya didn’t have a competitive offering. It came out with Avaya Spaces earlier this year.

Office is a full PBX with telephony features, while Spaces is a video collaboration/meeting/shared task offering with some telephony features. Both are sold under the UCaaS banner.

OneCloud is available as an on-premises offering or through Avaya’s own private cloud, which is provided by major colocation services providers like Equinix and Digital Reality Trust. Cloud Office is hosted on Google Cloud.