Avaya Taps Ujet, Cisco Vet to Lead North America Cloud Sales

Avaya has hired Darcey Harrison, previously Ujet’s chief revenue officer, as its new vice president of North America cloud sales.

Harrison and her team will be responsible for meeting Avaya’s cloud sales goals. They also will help ensure that their resellers are successful. She will report to chief revenue officer Stephen Spears and senior vice president of North American sales Frank Ciccone.

“Avaya has a longstanding strong and loyal customer base,” Harrison said. “As the company continues to focus on transitioning to serve their customers in a modern cloud environment, I couldn’t imagine a better place to make an impact.”

Avaya’s Darcey Harrison

Avaya’s partner community is “invaluable,” she said.

“Our goal is to support our partners in bringing the best solutions to their clients,” Harrison said. “Avaya is well-poised to do that across our product portfolio. Together, we help our clients win.”

At Ujet, Harrison was responsible for sales, channels, solutions consulting, customer success and sales operations. Before that, she was global vice president of sales, services and partnerships at Markforged. She also worked for Cisco Meraki.

Harrison’s to-do list includes getting to know Avaya’s team, partners and customers. She wants to understand their challenges and how she can help solve them.

“We’re building out our strategy to not only continue, but accelerate digital transformation, allowing our clients to innovate on customer experience,” she said.

Avaya Expands AWS Relationship for Added Contact Center AI

In other Avaya news, the company has expanded its AI-powered customer experience capabilities for Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers through an extended relationship with AWS.

Avaya is an AWS partner offering AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions. It can enable customers to leverage AWS AI services and ML capabilities to drive more rewarding customer and employee experiences across both voice and digital channels.

Eric Rossman is Avaya’s vice president of technology, partners and alliances.

“[This] provides Avaya partners with additional options to address customer opportunities where the customer has an existing preference toward AWS, including spend commitments that can be offset by bringing additional workloads to bear against that commitment,” he said.

Amazon’s approach to AI requires little if any expertise in the development of machine learning models, Rossman said. Furthermore, it offers a tool set for designing virtual assistant/automated chat interactions using Amazon Lex, Polly and other AWS AI capabilities.

Avaya partners can expand the scope of their own professional services to deliver development-like services to customers, Rossman said. They can implement the various workflows and user interactions desired for a more complete and comprehensive customer offering.

The overall relationship with AWS offers Avaya and its partners a competitive advantage, he said.

“Through Avaya’s A.I.Connect initiative, we have built an ecosystem of AI providers aimed at accelerating the adoption of AI solutions in the contact center and UC industries,” Rossman said.