Avaya Engage kicked off Monday highlighting its Experience Builders. That’s a global community that aligns Avaya services, partners, technology developers, customers and citizen developers.

Avaya Experience Builders makes it easier for businesses to build and deliver customized experiences. They do so by providing co-development support, including existing or tailored experiences, or technology to compose their own.

This is the first live Avaya Engage since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Simon Harrison is Avaya‘s senior vice president and CMO.

Avaya’s Simon Harrison

“We have tens of thousands of partners, over 150,000 developers, plus more than 100,000 customers worldwide, and the ambition to ensure every citizen developer can build experiences with the Avaya OneCloud platform,” he said. “Avaya OneCloud and the innovation Experience Builders are delivering every day are creating stronger brands, changing entire industries, and in many cases improving lives. Experience as a service is what we can provide enabling Experience Builders around the world to compose and wrap solutions around their own customers, tailored to every use case and every user.”

Avaya Engage 2021 is the showcase for the innovators to tell their stories, Harrison said.

“And we embrace these partners who are changing the game,” he said.

Among Experience Builders is Quantiphi, which specializes in Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI) services. It enhances customer and staff experiences across a number of verticals including health care, financial services, retail and more.

In addition, ConvergeOne leverages Avaya OneCloud CPaaS as architecture for its C1 Conversations solution.

Avaya’s Dennis Kozak

Dennis Kozak is Avaya’s senior vice president of strategic operations and global channel sales. In a Q&A with Channel Futures, he talks about what this latest Engage offers partners.

Facing Challenges Together

Channel Futures: What’s the theme of this latest Avaya Engage and what does it mean for partners?

Dennis Kozak: We’re excited that Avaya Engage 2021 is both an in-person as well as virtual event, giving us the opportunity to meet face to face with partners and partner’s customers for the first time in many months. Our focus at this event is on Avaya Experience Builders. Experience Builders obviously include our channel partners. And we are putting them front and center not only at Engage, but as part of our business strategy.

CF: How would you sum up 2021 for Avaya and its partners? What sort of challenges did they face and what did they achieve this year?

DK: Everyone knows the challenges that we’ve all faced together over the past 20 months. And 2021 showed us that in many ways, what we went through is now the new normal. So what Avaya and our partners achieved, in terms of continuing to meet customer needs that have been evolving and changing daily, has been remarkable. Partners have enabled and in many ways created, new business models, new applications, new routes to market and new ways to deliver innovation and value across every vertical market globally. This is exactly what being an Experience Builder is all about, composing and delivering optimal experiences that are tailored to every use case, rather than one-size-fits-all.

CF: Is Avaya going to be rolling out a new partner program for 2022? If so, how will it differ from this year’s program?

DK: Avaya launched an updated Edge channel program in October 2021. The program was dramatically simplified and is increasingly focused on migrating our mutual customers to subscription and cloud, as well as introducing Avaya UCaaS or CCaaS to new customers. There has never been a more lucrative time to partner with Avaya.

CF: Are new solutions/opportunities being announced for partners during Engage? If so, what are they?

DK: We are highlighting our latest innovations across the Avaya OneCloud platform, including CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS. And what is equally exciting are the large number of partners that are here showing and announcing their own solutions as part of our exhibit and technology showcase. Everywhere I turn here, and every partner I speak with, they are showing some really interesting solutions that are composed around OneCloud and meeting specific needs for customers that are helping them build their business, their brands, and their ability to grow and be successful. With Avaya OneCloud Solutions, there are more opportunities that ever for partners to help customers meet there business objectives!

CF: What’s the latest in terms of feedback from partners? What do they want to see from Avaya in 2022?

DK: Avaya’s channel continues to look to Avaya for thought leadership in assisting customers with their digital transformations toward better experiences for their employees and customers, specifically enabling partners to build recurring revenue based engagements with their customers.

CF: What can partners take away and make use of from this latest Engage?

DK: With over 80 breakout sessions hosted by experts from Avaya, and our customers and partners, we are giving partners a great deal of information, insight and tools they can use to address today’s critical business challenges. Partners will gain strategies to accelerate business success. And they can explore how Avaya OneCloud solutions can help them compose total experiences to transform their customer’s ability to increase engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.