WebRTC Expert Feature

August 27, 2014

UC And Clouds Brings HP And Avaya Together


“Don’t Fight Them -Join Them!” Avaya and HP Cloud UCaaS                          

As we at UC Strategies have long been saying, UC is not just about person-to-person communications, but also about interactions between people and business processes. Now that those business process apps are becoming mobilized and rapidly moving into “clouds,” UC-enabled communication applications are joining them there as well, in the form of UCaaS. This convergence was bound to affect the vendors who offered separate solutions for communications and business process applications and yesterday’s partnership announcement by Avaya and HP is a first indication of major industry consolidation between communication and business application vendors. 

Who Is Going To Do What?

In a global analyst teleconference today, Avaya’s Brett Shockley and HP’s David Dowse described how they would be dividing up their technology responsibilities in providing cloud-based unified communication services to all types of mobile and desktop end users that interact with business organizations. This will include internal employees, business partners, and customer/consumers (self-services and contact center access).

Although it is too early for a detailed outlook on everything that will be affected by this partnership, there is no question that the opportunity for combining the strengths of these two large, established vendors is enormous. Since both companies have large installed bases, they are in an ideal position to help their existing customers migrate gracefully to the SoMoClo future of business communications.

I asked about how the partnership will impact the development of CEBP capabilities that would enable business process applications to initiate personalized, direct contacts with individual end users (“notifications”) with flexible response options. Brett Shockley acknowledged that CEBP, although often talked about, was extremely difficult to implement in the past. He was optimistic about future possibilities with the combined skills of Avaya and HP.

In particular, I asked about their plans for supporting the development of mobile apps that will be UC-enabled  (to support “click-for –assistance” access to contact center support). HP ‘s David Dowse indicated that they see this area as having very strong potential for their future professional services business. They will be approaching such capabilities from a vertical market “use case” perspective, which is what I expected to hear. HP’s strong relationship with Microsoft’s Lync will be particularly useful in moving forward with the new Avaya relationship.

The contact center was a particular target for Avaya’s role in the partnership and would relieve HP’s heavy involvement with their global customer base. Bringing in mobility and the likes of WebRTC, there should be great opportunities to move into what I have been calling the next generation “Interaction Center,” that handles interoperability between self-services and flexible, contextual, live assistance communication (text, chat, voice, video, social).

The announcement by HP and Avaya is a direction that we should expect to see followed by all the major telecommunication vendors, since voice alone is no longer enough for business communications. So stay tuned for further industry consolidation!




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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