I was reading the article https://www.uctoday.com/unified-communications/avaya-showcases-latest-innovations-at-gitex-2022/ and this paragraph particularly caught my attention:
The company has stated that it is focusing on "innovation without disruption" as a big part of its upcoming strategy(...)
It sounds nice, but I no longer believe in innovation here. You? I stopped considering this company as innovative a long time ago.
Well, the highly anticipated product roadmap 2023 was... predictably underwhelming and lacking detail.
Can't wait to see the Innovation Roadmap on 01 Nov. Rumour has it Avaya are providing ways for customers to integrate their CC's into the Metaverse...
Hope it's more successful than similar virtual world storefront offered via the Nortel acquired Web.Alive (aka AvayaLive Engage) platform that was end sale'd in 2016.
This is a very good statement "Most of Avaya's product set post 2000 spin-off has been achieved by acquisition/partnership"
Everything we highlight we sell is not home grown (CPaaS, CCaaS, ACO, Spaces, Avaya Messaging, WFO and now Alcatel-Lucent for networking)
What are they going to innovate that was originally an Avaya Product (Aura, IP Office), the last innovation they had that was impressive was "Powered By IP Office" where they Containerized IP Office into Google Cloud but they ki---d that after a year and a half to get the $500M from RingCentral.
We are more of a partner for all these companies than an actual company that develops and sells their own products.
Past performance shows the sad facts. Avaya Labs or Emerging Products & Technologies have been impotent since patent filings peaked in 2011. Most of Avaya's product set post 2000 spin-off has been achieved by acquisition/partnership: VPnet, Quintus, RouteScience, Vista, Tenovis, Spectel, Nimcat Networks, Extreme Networks, Traverse Networks, LifeSize, Ubiquity, Agile, Adomo, Nortel, Aurix, Persony, Sipera, Konftel, KnoahSoft, Radvision, Conversive, ITNavigator, Esna, Spoken Communications, CTIntegrations, RingCentral (with Avaya board representation!), Microsoft, Google, Alcatel-Lucent, Honeywell.
Not forgetting some notable'in-house' developed fails like Flare, Web.Alive, ADVD, E169, L-Series headsets.
No marketing rebrand smoke and mirrors (Aura -> IX -> OneCloud) conceals the lack of meaningful R&D driven innovation to drive revenue.
The recent announcement to offer OneCloud xCaaS via wholesale partnerships is the latest poster child. Yup, real innovation right there!
Really can't wait to see Avaya 'Roadmap Full of Innovation' on Nov 1. Maybe yet another partnership (this time with Metaverse) will save Avaya ;-)
Regarding the loss of access to Bell Labs:
When Avaya spun off from Lucent, the R&D people who came with Avaya were excellent. They contributed many terrific technical innovations after the spin-off. Just as important, Avaya management worked closely with them to create highly innovative products. There was wonderful teamwork 20 years ago, and no need to keep renaming products in order to create the illusion of progress.
I can't say whether the low-cost replacements in the low-cost countries are less innovative than the US-based people Avaya pushed out the door, or whether the issue is that Avaya's current management doesn't know how to manage innovation, but the lack of innovation today was definitely not caused by losing access to Bell Labs R&D.
Pretty sure customers would be happy with just innovation. All Avaya do is partner-up, the latest venture being with Honeywell ! The Avaya 'patent wall of recognition' is great, but where's the real-World applications that customers could actually use? The real innovation ceased as soon as Avaya lost Bell Labs R&D. The Avaya Labs are a joke.