Avaya unveiled a key rebranding message at Engage, and while it is essentially a marketing exercise, it will see huge changes that the company believes will position it much better heading forward.
Avaya CEO Jim Chirico onstage at Engage
AUSTIN – Newer Avaya product names like Equinox and Zang will quickly disappear. Long-time, familiar brands like Aura and IP Office will last longer, but all are headed for the chopping block. It’s part of a major transformation strategy by Avaya to simplify their portfolio for customers and give their solutions names which more closely interact with what the products do.
“We have been wrestling with this for the last three to six months or so,” said Jim Chirico, Avaya’s CEO. “We know that in the past, we have been extremely complex to work with. In addition, the product names didn’t have any relation to the functionality they performed. So we stepped and took a look at it. We concluded that our naming was too complicated. What we do is deliver intelligent experiences. We aren’t a PBX company any more.”
Accordingly IX – short for Intelligent Xperience – becomes the new Avaya master brand, which covers the whole spectrum of solutions, for the Contact Center, Unified Communications, and Collaboration.
“It’s not just new names,” said Laurent Philomenko, Avaya’s Senior Vice President, Innovation. “There is a physical reality to it. It is how customers see us, and it becomes a simple way to people for access Avaya.”
“It comes from the need to make things simpler,” said Mike Kuch, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Avaya. “The product names now align with how a customer consumes them.”
This is still a work in progress, and not everything has been redefined. However, there is a new Avaya IX Digital Workplace, and under it comes Calling, Meetings, Collaboration and Devices.
“Calling will include IP Office and Aura, Meetings is Equinox and Scopia, and Collaboration is Zang,” Kuch indicated.
The other areas are Avaya IX Digital Contact Center, which includes Voice, Omnichannel, Desktop and Workforce Engagement, and Avaya IX Mobility, which will include Call deflection to digital, and Identity management. Some of these categories do not even have solutions on the market today, but Avaya says they are in pipeline. That’s a key factor in all of this of course – how soon Avaya can deliver on these, and how good they are once they appear.
“We will deliver more of those as we expand around mobility and AI,” Chirico said.
The timeframe for the name changes is still somewhat opaque, but we have some indications.
“Some of them will take a while before they move on – notably IP Office and Aura,” Kuch said. “We did some surveys on how many places we used them, and it is in the tens of thousands, including the certifications on those products. Those things will transition over time, and what those timeframes will be is still in evaluation. But there are other products, like Equinox, which we will transition almost immediately.”
The Avaya OneCloud platform, which spans multiple UCaaS and CCaaS cloud deployment options, was also announced Monday, and is part of the rebranding.
Telanet President Dan Silverman and friend
Dan Silverman, President of Telanet, a telecommunications service provider and Avaya partner which is Toronto-headquartered, but now does more than half of their business in the U.S., liked the rebranding.
“The thought philosophy now is the same one that we drive to our customers – that experience matters,” he said. “My customers’ positive experience helps me grow my business. Avaya’s slogan of ‘The Power of We’ didn’t say much. The branding was difficult, and it was hard for customers to understand. As we evolved from a phone company to handle a broad range of solutions like unified communications and managed services around firewalls, Wi-Fi and anti-virus, we had to rebrand ourselves in the same way.”
