Avaya's 20th anniversary marks its start again. Fu Lili, president of Greater China, says Avaya will transform to a cloud model

[51CTO.com original article] On October 1, 2000, Lucent Technologies' Enterprise Communications Group became independent and established Avaya, which was listed in New York. It has been exactly 20 years since then. As the leader with the largest market share in enterprise communications, Avaya now has businesses in 190 countries around the world, providing 140 million unified communications lines and 6 million contact centers for more than 130,000 customers. In the just-concluded fiscal year 2020, Avaya's performance increased significantly, with global business revenue of US$2.873 billion. In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, Avaya's revenue was US$755 million, a year-on-year increase of 4%, which can be described as "going against the market" among many companies that are generally "retrograde" under the influence of the new crown epidemic. In early winter, Fu Lili, President of Avaya Greater China, accepted an interview with a 51CTO reporter in her office, talking about Avaya's gains and transformation exploration in 2020. She told reporters that Avaya will go lightly and transform to multi-cloud architecture SaaS at full speed.

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Fu Lili, President of Avaya Greater China

Avaya in China

In 2020, China became the only major economy in the world to achieve positive growth, and its economic, technological, and market activities are among the best in the world. Fu Lili told reporters that Avaya has always attached great importance to the Chinese market and has deep feelings for China. According to her, since Avaya's predecessor Lucent Technologies first brought call center technology to China in the 1990s, the new communication business model has brought rapid growth to many industries such as Chinese operators and financial services in the past 20 years. Today, user needs in the Chinese market are becoming more and more diversified, and emerging technology innovation companies are very active and numerous, which is an extremely attractive frontier position for Avaya.

"Avaya has firm investment confidence in China and has always shared the same destiny with the Chinese market. In February this year, during the most critical period of the epidemic, Avaya donated a large number of telemedicine, teleconsultation and televisit systems to 11 hospitals in China, including Leishenshan Hospital and Huoshenshan Hospital, and provided more than 10,000 remote home seats and remote office solutions to more than 40 companies in China, which received very positive recognition from the society."

Transform and start again, moving towards multi-cloud!

Looking back at Avaya's development over the years, we have to admit that the outstanding performance of its predecessor, Lucent Technologies, has given Avaya a very high starting point since its independence, as if it was standing on the shoulders of giants. However, the same halo has actually become the biggest shackle on the road to transformation. Ten years ago, when people talked about Avaya, the first impression was that it was an equipment manufacturer, famous for selling communication equipment worldwide. But soon, the innovative Avaya successfully transformed into a company mainly based on software and services. Fu Lili told reporters that in Q4, Avaya's software and services accounted for 88% of total revenue, a year-on-year increase of 5 percentage points, of which global subscription service revenue has exceeded 200 million US dollars.

Now, Avaya is about to start its second transformation. This time, Avaya positions itself as an enterprise communications SaaS service provider based on a multi-cloud organization. In August of this year, Avaya released a new brand architecture, Avaya One Cloud, globally, which covers Avaya's full range of products and services, from the cloud-based future-oriented intelligent customer experience center, to the UC&CC unified collaborative communications in the digital mobile workplace, to the cloud-based enterprise communications platform capability CPaaS. In the future, whether it is CC or UC, whether it is from private cloud deployment to hybrid cloud, and then to public cloud architecture, Avaya can support multi-cloud architecture. It is reported that in the current Q4 revenue, the part from private cloud has increased by 11%, while the revenue from emerging businesses based on cloud and ecological alliances and subscription services has increased by more than 30%.

Fu Lili said that the first step of Avaya's transformation is to migrate Avaya's traditional products and equipment to the cloud and adapt them to mainstream clouds, including Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft. In China, Avaya took the lead in cooperating with Alibaba Cloud and completed the adaptation of the entire Avaya product technology to Alibaba Cloud. Just in October, Avaya and Alibaba Damo Academy released an Avaya-based contact center, while using Alibaba's AI engine and integrated technology to provide a new generation of intelligent contact center enterprise service brain. "Whether it is a foreign-funded enterprise in China or a Chinese enterprise going overseas, when they need to deploy Avaya's communication system in the cloud, Avaya can help them achieve migration and deployment on Alibaba Cloud."

The reporter learned that in the past, Avaya's equipment and systems were relatively closed, but now Avaya will provide users with an open communication platform to unleash their communication capabilities. Developers from all walks of life can use native API interfaces to swiftly call Avaya's communication capabilities into their own architectures. At the same time, the friendly API can timely integrate excellent development applications in the Avaya ecosystem into the Avaya communication platform, promoting the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

Chinese enterprises’ digital transformation cannot do without Avaya

Nowadays, Chinese companies are joining the digital transformation movement one after another. User experience, employee efficiency, and IT operation and maintenance costs have become important criteria for measuring the success of a company's digital transformation. These three factors undoubtedly put higher demands on the company's ICT communication capabilities.

As a leader in global corporate communications, Avaya can provide strong support in these three areas. In terms of customer experience, Avaya's cloud-based intelligent contact center, which uses AI and big data, can meet the personalized needs of enterprises. In terms of employee efficiency, the collaborative communications in digital and mobile office spaces provided by Avaya to enterprises have brought very high communication efficiency, which can quickly respond to needs and keep up with market changes. In terms of IT operation and maintenance costs, Avaya provides a unified communication platform that can not only contact external end users, but also support internal employee office communication collaboration, greatly optimizing IT operation and maintenance costs. Moreover, after Avaya switched to multi-cloud deployment, cloud computing capabilities can also help enterprises save investment funds.

Avaya still has a lot to do next. Fu Lili said that Avaya will strengthen intensive training for traditional partners and lead them to achieve technological transformation. On the other hand, Avaya and its partners will recruit more technical talents and cooperate with more emerging technology companies in China to create a broader and more comprehensive ecosystem.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]