Kathy Gibson reports from Gitex – South Africa is a key market for Avaya, which counts the country’s top organisations among its customers.
Nidal Abou-Ltaif, president of Avaya International, tells IT-Online that customers are bullish about the future, as they look forward to consuming more cloud services and leveraging modern technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
South African companies are already at the cutting edge of contact centre technology, he adds, as one of the leaders in domestic and outsourced usage.
“I am very optimistic about the market,” Abou-Ltaif says.
The only thing holding companies back at the moment is the availability of Avaya public cloud services – and these will be delivered soon.
“We were about to release public cloud, then Covid hit and we have to switch out priorities,” says Abou-Ltaif. “More recently we have been hit with a shortage of components, which has delayed the launch further.”
All Avaya public cloud services are based on Microsoft’s Azure platform, and the company is now rolling it out across the region.
“We expect to have public cloud services available in South Africa by the end of the first half of 2023, maybe just at the beginning of the third quarter.”
The South African market has a good appetite for cloud, Abou-Ltaif.
When it comes to the African continent as a whole, he says Avaya is seeing a good level of investment from service providers and governments, particularly noticeable in new markets like Sudan.
“The pandemic has given a lot of people the incentive to digitalise, and we see the market really starting to pick up in places like Ghana and Nigeria,” Abou-Ltaif says.
Abou-Ltaif points out that organisations are increasingly positioning their contact centres to generate revenue while simultaneously deliver services. “They are looking to their contact centres to enhance the overall customer experience.”
Traditionally, Avaya’s customers have been the big names in telecommunications, banking and local government. But Abou-Ltaif believes small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent a big untapped market opportunity.
“We could do a lot better in the SME space, and will look to our partners to open up that market. Once the public cloud services are available, we will have more services to offer to smaller companies.
“Services like public cloud Spaces, video for the cloud and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) will all appeal to the SME market.”
Reiterating Avaya’s commitment to its South African operations, Abou-Ltaif says: “It is my biggest market in Africa; and certainly the most aggressive and progressive. It has everything it takes to be great.”
Avaya has a well-established ecosystem of partners in South Africa, but Fadi Moubarak, vice-president: channels at Avaya, doesn’t rule out the possibility of new partners joining the stable.
“The transition to cloud opens the door for new types of partners and new segments seeking cloud solutions,” he says. “But we always do these things in a calculated manner to ensure we don’t crowd the market or have partners going after the same opportunities.
“Our partnering model is not about the numbers, but about the focus, the mutual relevant of us to their business and them to ours.”
There are two types of partners that typically work with Avaya, he adds. There are those that simply resell the Avaya solution suite, and there are those that integrate their own and third-party systems with the platform.
“These are the partners we are on the lookout for,” Moubarak says. “We know that when a customer experience or employee experience system has multiple building blocks, the role of the partner is crucial in gluing together those multiple solutions.”
Moubarak adds that companies’ approach to contact centres changed during the Covid pandemic. “Customers got used to less face-to-face interaction, preferring voice, app or remote communication as much as possible. And this will probably continue into the future.
“It’s the same as the delivery and online shopping boom that hasn’t come down after Covid: every industry has been deeply impacted in terms of how they reach and serve their customers.
“This means that customer experience has become more important.”
Avaya has seen some customers shift into the cloud, and expects this to increase over time.
“We are trying to make it easier for customers and our channel by keeping all the various models alive: customers can opt for an onpremise solution, with or without subscriptions, or private, hybrid of public cloud.
“We are not forcing a pace on to customers and partners.”