Image Gallery: Avaya Engage 2018 Featuring Arrow, ConvergeOne, Carousel Industries
What a difference a year makes.
Last year’s Avaya Engage conference took place just a month after the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. There was uncertainty in the air as conference attendees were anxious to hear more about the company’s plans to work through and emerge from chapter 11.
Flash forward to this year’s Engage in New Orleans and excitement replaced uncertainty as Avaya has emerged from chapter 11 as a public company with a little less than half the debt it had when it filed, and has outlined plans for aggressive growth in the coming months.
The conference, Avaya’s biggest Engage ever, drew more than 3,000 partners and customers to the Big Easy. Borrowing a famous quote from Mark Twain, Jim Chirico, Avaya’s president and CEO, told attendees the “rumors of Avaya’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Click through our gallery below for highlights of the event and for people you might know, then read our daily stories from the event:
- Avaya Cloud Preps Partners for ‘New, Groundbreaking Technologies’
- Avaya Launches New Technologies, Including Cloud-Based AI
- Arrow, Carousel, AT&T Among Avaya Partner of the Year Award Winners
- Avaya, ‘Playing to Win,” Buys Cloud Contact Center Provider
- Avaya’s Mercer Rowe: Company Well On Its Way in Cloud Transition
The Engage Opening Party at Mardi Gras World gave attendees an authentic taste of the Big Easy with live music, including a performance by the Landry-Walker High School Marching Band, and authentic New Orleans cuisine.
Partners, customers, analysts and others socialize in the Grand Oaks Mansion, an indoor replica of a Civil War-era mansion, during the opening party.
The first general session kicked off with a somber, then celebratory jazz funeral that had attendees on their feet. CEO Jim Chirico then took the stage and said “there’s something different in the air. It is different and it’s a great time to be at Avaya.”
Chirico told attendees Avaya has “realigned and reenergized its partner community,” and that throughout the past year the company continued to develop and deliver “innovative solutions in emerging technologies. We overcame distractions, we continued to take the necessary steps to strengthen our business, but more importantly, strengthen your success.”
Avaya also opened the conference by announcing it is acquiring Spoken Communications, a provider of enterprise contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) offerings.
Joining Chirico onstage, Mohamad Afshar, Spoken’s president and CEO, said the combination “fundamentally changes the economics of contact center. We are the first solution in the market that combines communications and voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) into a single offering.” In addition, the company announced Avaya Ava, a new AI architecture, and enhancements to its Equinox UC applications.
Mercer Rowe, vice president and general manager of Avaya Cloud, told attendees that the company has every asset necessary to create a “world-class platform and that’s what we’re going to do. We have the ability to offer on-premises, cloud, hybrid, partner hosted, whatever model makes sense for your business or whatever mix of models. We can deliver our solutions through those cloudy models with the speed and capabilities that you need.”
Arrow Systems Integration’s booth in the Solutions Expo. Arrow was named Avaya’s Innovation Partner of the Year. The expo hall included 98 exhibitors.
ConvergeOne is the largest Avaya business partner globally. It implements and manages Avaya’s Breeze application platform. This week, Avaya named ConvergeOne its Service Partner of the Year.
Connected banking was one of the services demonstrated at Avaya’s expansive booth. It includes several channels for customers to interact with their banks, such as the VIP experience, which allows a direct connection to a personal banker, a video experience to try to retain customers a bank is at risk of losing, and a social option for younger customers on social media.
Carousel Industries of North America was named Avaya’s Midmarket Partner of the Year. Its sales staff of more than 250 field and 40 inside sales associates hold more than 100 midmarket certifications.
Spoken Communications’ cloud-native, multitenant architecture is integrated with Avaya Aura and Elite technologies. As a result, it also provides an architecture for both Avaya’s omnichannel offerings, such as Oceana, and it’s UCaaS offerings.
Avaya has partnered with Arrow Systems Integration on a smart-city Internet of Things (IoT) service, and demonstrated how it works with a Lego Smart City in the expo hall.
