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Avaya Refocusing Support Away from SMB Contact Centers

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Avaya has announced yet another round of cuts in vital personnel recently, as it continues its pivot away from small and medium contact center clients. CEO Patrick Dennis, who took over in September of 2024, announced that Avaya will be focusing only on supporting Avaya “G1500” clients - the largest 1500 customers globally. This is a continuation of a years-long trend shedding much of the small and mid-market (up to 2,500 seats) contact centers.

 

As a corporate decision, this makes sense. Supporting smaller contact center sites has become increasingly more expensive and less profitable. With this realignment, Avaya hopes that re-deploying support and engineering personnel, along with cuts in mid-management, and a focus on their largest clients will return them to a profit margin of 40%.

 

But where does that leave non-G1500 customers? Analysts anticipate that there will be cascading ramifications caused by this dramatic pivot in Avaya’s business plan. With this official announcement, all non-61500 sites are essentially out of their scope. Then there is the question of future development. According to Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, “If you’re focusing on a top segment, like Avaya’s “G1500″, you don’t need teams working on products for smaller clients or niche products that don’t sell.” Also, support will continue to decline, as top support personnel will be moved to work with G1500 clients.

 

We see a few ways forward for current Avaya contact center sites.

1.       Engage a hybrid solution (like Zoom). Zoom will displace your telephony carrier and send the calls to the Avaya switch (PBX), which will sit behind Zoom. The advantage is that you can continue to use the Avaya hardware (PBXs) and telephone sets (where supported) and bring some A.I. functionality into your contact center. The disadvantage is that you still need support on the PBX and desktop phones, which will require maintenance contracts. And whatever level of support you are used to with Avaya, it will surely diminish because of layoffs and re-allocation of key support personnel. Plus, you will still be relying on Avaya for the limited reporting they provide.

2.       Initiate a two-step approach and migrate your contact center onto a cloud contact center solution (CCaaS), which will immediately enable you to enjoy the latest Omni channel offerings, A.I. functionality, and deep reporting capability. Down the road, you can add the non-contact center office extensions and enjoy a fully featured PBX for the rest of your site and move off the Avaya and their maintenance contracts entirely.

3.       Initiate a full “lift and shift” migration and move both your contact center and your office extensions to a solution that supports both.

 

These are the three most obvious ways forward, but there are more nuanced options that may be appropriate, depending on your situation.

 

 Here at CloudConsult, we can meet with you and discuss all your options and define the pros and cons of each. We access all the most recognized contact center solutions in the marketplace, and we can offer an unbiased assessment of the few that best meet your present and future requirements.

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