Avaya and IBM Sign Agreement to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Strategy and Drive Business Transformation

Avaya Holdings Corp. and IBM today announced that Avaya will adopt hybrid cloud solutions from IBM to help expand its Avaya ReadyNow private cloud unified communications and contact center offerings internationally and accelerate modernization.

As part of its focus on providing choice and flexibility in cloud solutions, Avaya is expanding the availability of its Avaya ReadyNow private cloud offerings in order to help meet growing demand from clients across the globe. By working with IBM to implement a hybrid cloud strategy, Avaya plans to tap into advanced technologies like AI to modernize its offering while enabling its customers to benefit from the scale and performance of IBM’s global footprint of cloud data centers.

By hosting and managing select services on a private cloud, Avaya aims to deliver secure and resilient solutions to its clients and service their needs more efficiently while accessing higher value services that can help transform their customer experience. For example, Avaya will be able to take advantage of IBM Watson APIs to accelerate decision making and enhance the customer experience by infusing AI into its customer support function.

“Companies today need to be able to deliver the best experiences for their customers while improving efficiency and business performance,” said Chris McGugan, SVP, Solutions and Technology, Avaya. “Together, IBM and Avaya plan to deliver one of the most complete contact center solutions on the market, featuring Avaya’s best-of-breed software and infrastructure with IBM’s leadership in hybrid cloud, consulting and implementation services. We are excited to collaborate with IBM as part of our hybrid multicloud strategy to provide customers with experiences that matter at cloud speed. Additionally, the combination of Avaya and IBM Watson APIs will help make businesses work smarter, and I am pleased to form this strategic alliance.”

“Our clients are embracing hybrid cloud strategies in order to modernize their businesses and drive innovation, while maintaining high security standards,” said Denis Kennelly, General Manager, Cloud Integration, IBM. “By working with Avaya to integrate this hybrid cloud approach, we can help them enhance their performance and security for clients while accelerating access to higher value services that can help differentiate their offerings and drive customer loyalty.”

As they enter the next chapter of the cloud journey, businesses like Avaya need to seamlessly and securely connect data and workloads across on-premise and cloud environments from multiple vendors. IBM is the leading hybrid cloud provider for enterprises, and its acquisition of Red Hat further enables businesses to accelerate innovation.