Avaya, a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, and Microsoft today used GITEX Technology Week 2019 to announce that they will join forces to bring contact-centre services to the cloud.

Avaya IX Contact Centre as a Service (Avaya IX CCaaS) will be available on Azure, hosted in Microsoft’s cloud data centres in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The service will be introduced initially in the Arab Gulf region with plans to expand the offer to other global regions in the future.

“Avaya is a trusted leader in contact-centre solutions,” said Ahmed Helmy, International CTO Avaya. “Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to expand our feature-rich applications on a cloud-based microservices architecture and platform – giving our customers the flexibility in deployment they have come to expect from our brand. They will also have the welcome assurance and flexibility to run their workloads across multiple clouds.”

The two companies are working to integrate the market-leading Avaya IX Contact Center platform with Azure. The new Avaya IX CCaaS offering is anticipated to be available with voice capabilities in the first half of 2020, with omnichannel features (video, social media, live chat and others) to follow later that year.

“Through our work with Avaya, Microsoft now has the opportunity through our marketplace to offer enterprise-grade CCaaS solutions to businesses of any size delivered through Avaya and running on our Azure cloud,” said Sherif Tawfik, Executive Director, Channel, Alliances, Startups, and SMEs. “At Microsoft, it is our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Every application that makes its home in our intelligent cloud takes us a step more down that road.”

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, said: “The contact center market continues to evolve quickly putting pressure on organizations of all sizes. The cloud offers companies a fast path to a modernized, Omni-channel solution. However, one size does not fit all when it comes to cloud contact center.

The partnership between Microsoft Gulf and Avaya is ideally suited to meet the needs of mid and large size organizations that seek a hybrid cloud that provides the economics of CCaaS combined with the control and security of private cloud

The announcement was made at a special event today during the 39th GITEX Technology Week, Ahmed Helmy, Chief Technology Officer from Avaya International and Sherif Tawfik, Executive Director- Channel, Alliances, Startups and SME’s at Microsoft UAE were on hand to explain how customers across the region – and soonafter, the world – would be able to accelerate digital transformation, engaging customers, empowering employees, optimising operations and reinventing business models, through the power of CCaaS.