Avaya Holdings Corp, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, and Microsoft have used GITEX Technology Week 2019 to announce that they will join forces to bring contact centre services to the cloud.
Avaya IX-CC, a next generation Contact Center as a Service platform, will be available on Azure, hosted in Microsoft’s cloud data centres in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The service will be introduced initially in the Arab Gulf region with plans to expand the offer to other global regions in the future.
“Avaya is a trusted leader in contact centre solutions,” said Ahmed Helmy, International CTO, Avaya. “Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to expand our feature-rich applications on a cloud-based microservices architecture and platform – giving our customers the flexibility in deployment they have come to expect from our brand. They will also have the welcome assurance and flexibility to run their workloads across multiple clouds.”
The two companies are working to integrate the market-leading Avaya IX-CC platform with Azure. The Avaya IX-CC next generation Contact Center as a Service platform is expected to be available to customers in H1 2020 with voice capabilities, followed by omnichannel features later in the year.
“Through our work with Avaya, Microsoft now has the opportunity through our marketplace to offer enterprise-grade CCaaS solutions to businesses of any size delivered through Avaya and running on our Azure cloud,” said Sherif Tawfik, Executive Director, Channel, Alliances, Startups and SMEs.
“At Microsoft, it is our mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. Every application that makes its home in our intelligent cloud takes us a step more down that road.”
Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, said: “The contact centre market continues to evolve quickly putting pressure on organisations of all sizes. The cloud offers companies a fast path to a modernised,omn-channel solution. However, one size does not fit all when it comes to cloud contact centre.”
The announcement was made at a special event on the first day of the 39th GITEX Technology Week.
Ahmed Helmy, Chief Technology Officer from Avaya International and Sherif Tawfik, Executive Director, Channel, Alliances, Startups and SMEs at Microsoft UAE, were on hand to explain how customers across the region – and soon after, the world – would be able to accelerate Digital Transformation, engaging customers, empowering employees, optimising operations and reinventing business models, through the power of CCaaS.
