Avaya's Infinity rollout bolsters cloud, on-prem options

Avaya users who intend to migrate contact centers to the cloud a few features at a time and those who live in a hybrid on-premises and cloud environment now have a platform that can satisfy both aims.

Named Infinity, Avaya's new platform combines on-premises and cloud workflows, giving users a choice of which functions to migrate to the cloud and which to keep on-premises.

Infinity is built on Edify, a contact center as a service (CCaaS) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform Avaya acquired last year. Edify tailored its features to orchestrate customer and employee experiences in the cloud, but they are also fully containerized in Kubernetes to run on-premises.

Avaya has shed many legacy products in recent years from 140 to fewer than half that number after emerging from two bankruptcies. Furthermore, it has told customers and resellers that, starting in July, the company will be "evolving" to a minimum CCaaS license of 200 seats for its Avaya Experience Platform, which will not be the case for Avaya Infinity, according to a company spokesperson.

The company intends to eventually merge all its products into a single Infinity product, said Tony Lama, senior vice president and general manager of product at Avaya and former Edify CEO.

"We needed a way to start thinking about customer experience end to end," Lama said. "That's really the problem we're trying to solve for customers. We're going to bring that to market in the product stack here at Avaya, [and] we're going to focus on fewer things."

Many of Avaya's CCaaS and UCaaS customers remain on-premises with their systems, said Alpa Shah, global vice president at research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. In fact, it is likely that many contact centers will keep at least part of their operations on-premises permanently, especially in regulated industries such as healthcare and banking.

Avaya Infinity acknowledges this reality, she said. That message should resonate with Avaya's installed base of many customers still invested in on-premises systems.

"Especially right now, with security issues [and data privacy], even if cloud can do it as well, there are some companies who still will remain on-premises," Shah said.

Avaya customers are divided on cloud migrations, Lama said. Working toward keeping some functions on-premises might sound like a way of holding on to legacy tech, but it's actually a "radical" idea in the current market.

While Infinity is more targeted toward current customers, some old Avaya customers that moved on to competing CCaaS systems are coming back after not-so-successful implementations, he said.

"I think that the players in this space have all but convinced everyone that the only way to adopt modern capabilities and tools is to move to the cloud," Lama said. "We're bringing a modern set of capabilities, on one common codebase, that can be delivered to our customers either on-premises or in the cloud. Our customers can start to adopt this modernization in place and at their pace."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.