Avaya Partners with Microsoft to Deliver Avaya OneCloud Solutions on Microsoft Azure

Avaya and Microsoft have expanded their global partnership by pairing the Avaya OneCloud portfolio with Microsoft Azure.

Building on the success of Avaya OneCloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure, Avaya is now expanding its partnership to include the Avaya OneCloud portfolio on Azure for customers that want to deploy in a hybrid, public, or private cloud environment.

"Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is an important milestone in our continued transformation to a cloud business model," said David Austin, senior vice president of strategy and alliances at Avaya, in a statement. "The global scale of Microsoft helps ensure that our joint customers rapidly deploy Avaya OneCloud solutions in any cloud environment of their choice with speed, agility, and cost competitiveness. This represents a tremendous opportunity for customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud, and a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to expand our go-to-market reach through the co-selling efforts we have identified with our trusted partner."

"Many of our largest customers have standardized on Avaya communications solutions, and offering Avaya OneCloud on Microsoft Azure gives them an additional opportunity to benefit from their investments while accelerating their cloud migration," said Casey McGee, vice president of global independent software vendor partner sales at Microsoft, in a statement. "Together, we are working to help customers around the world transform their businesses and drive digital transformation and implement workload migration initiatives more rapidly. This is a significant opportunity, particularly for Microsoft customers as they move more workloads to Azure."

Avaya has achieved co-sell-ready status, which means Avaya will work directly with Microsoft sales teams and partners on joint selling and enablement opportunities.

With the partnership, Avaya CCaaS customers also gain access to Nuance Communications' Contact Center AI technology integrated with OneCloud.

"The combined capabilities of Microsoft and Nuance give Avaya customers flexibility to create and deliver intelligent, personalized, and impactful consumer interactions with long-term investment protection and control of their data," said Tony Lorentzen, senior vice president of intelligent engagement solutions at Nuance, a Microsoft company, in a statement.

This news builds on Avaya's longstanding relationship with Microsoft. Together Avaya, Microsoft, and Nuance provide integration spanning not just the contact center application itself but also the underlying communication platforms. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers have increased customer insight via CRM data maintained within Dynamics 365 and benefit from Microsoft's AI capabilities via Azure Cognitive Services. Later this year, Avaya expects to further expand OneCloud CCaaS capabilities with Microsoft Teams integration.

"The addition of Avaya OneCloud to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace provides customers with the agility to create communications and collaboration experiences using the public, private, or hybrid cloud delivery approaches to offer the broadest range of options to fit an organization's needs," said Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, in a statement. "By partnering with Microsoft on both enablement and go to market, Avaya gains expanded customer reach and a significant new influencing channel to broadcast its unique agility and experience proposition. Further, organizations gain the benefit of expertise from these two global leaders to advance their innovation agenda."