Summary Bullets:
• Avaya finally has a cloud strategy; a late mover compared to the other UCC players
• But cloud adoption in Asia-Pacific especially in emerging markets is still low and demand is growing
While Avaya already has a number of cloud-based deployments for several years for example Avaya IP Office as-a-Service (IPOaaS) offered by Optus in Australia, the cloud delivery model is mainly driven by the partners. Avaya itself is finally moving to cloud-based offerings recently. It is a late move considering the other UC major players have gone to cloud years earlier, for example Cisco with Spark and Webex and Microsoft with Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for Business.
The journey is not going to be easy for Avaya as the cloud UC and CC markets are getting more competitive. There has been increasing number of new entrants in this space and the focus is on developing cloud-based offerings. Avaya is going against not just the traditional UC and CC providers, but also the webscale players, over-the-top (OTT) providers and start-ups. AWS entered the UC and CC market last year, Alibaba launched its first DingTalk in English starting from Malaysia, Enghouse Interactive expanded its capabilities around Microsoft-based CCaaS, Facebook launched Workplace, Whatsapp launched Whatsapp Business, and telkomtelstra partnered with IPScape and Whispir to offer CCaaS and UCaaS in Indonesia. The trend is going towards creating team collaboration workspaces with a rich set of tools including synchronous communications (e.g., voice, video, conferencing, and desktop sharing) and asynchronous collaboration (e.g., persistent chat, file sharing, and a shared digital workspace). Cisco’s Spark, Microsoft Team, Slack and AWS Chime are some examples that enable customers to collaborate in project teams more effectively.
Avaya may have missed the early adopters, but looking at the overall Asia-Pacific, there is still a huge opportunity for Avaya to grab with its cloud-based offerings as the adoption in the region is still low, especially in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and South Asia. Take IP PBX and web conferencing for example. GlobalData estimates hosted IP PBX in Asia-Pacific to grow at 15.7% CAGR until 2021, while web conferencing service at 14.4%, as shown below. The growth in the market reflects the rapid migration of workloads to the cloud.
A recent study in an emerging Asia market reveals that connectivity and data residency are among the top inhibitors for the businesses to migrate from on-premises to the cloud while GlobalData research in security is showing the global compliance requirements increasing. Businesses in emerging Asian market should consider Avaya as it has the right capabilities to address the needs in the region. For example IP Office Select offers scalability and integration with LDAP and Active Directory and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered self-service agent, “ava” which provides businesses with competitive advantage in customer engagement. The company also has Avaya Aura and IP Office which offer flexible deployment (dedicated or shared servers, virtualized environment or within public cloud) while its Avaya Aura Session Manager’s offers capability to integrate with third party PBXs and migration path for legacy Nortel systems.
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