Dave and Evan host their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.
Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.
Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.
Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as:
Dave and Evan host their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.
Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.
Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.
Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as:
Welcome to Talking Heads. Today we have a bonus episode with two guests from Avaya wha and, and Laura we're gonna be talking about one cloud see powers and all kinds of stuff. But before that, Evan, I saw you recently in Miami. I'm in Europe right now traveling again. I'm beginning to remember why I didn't like travel. Have you had any kind of epiphany is about? Oh, yeah, I forgot how much I hate to travel any of that come to you.
Evan Kirstel:I'm not going anywhere new unless it's on a bike. That's my new plan. Basically, everything is is awful. Is that a fair statement when it comes to travel?
Dave Michels:It is unbelievable how much I forgot how bad travel is people
Evan Kirstel:worse than you remembered because pre pandemic it was just capacity and but now you can't get a rental car. You can't get a cheap flight. You can't get a hotel. You can't get a pilot for your plane.
Dave Michels:Well, that's natural shortages. But I'm talking about just the the crap that we have to put up with. I was just in Newark, right? I was in the Newark Airport,
Evan Kirstel:I changed condolences.
Dave Michels:Yeah, I changed I had a layover and a change flights. And you know, flights were delayed. I forgot about flight delays and all this nonsense. And I met this gate that is in the middle of nowhere, I make travel a little better with my with my club memberships. But there is no club anywhere near this gate. And the flight keeps getting delayed and delayed. So I there's nothing to do but just keep waiting because it's like 20 minute delay, another 20 minutes, another 20 minutes. And then they finally move the gate and it's like I'm so excited. They move the gate to one right next to a club. So I was like, Oh, now I can go relax. Now I can go get my go get my free soda and my complimentary peanuts. And I go down to there. And they closing the club to closing the club that they could do on time. They can't run the flights on time, but they can close the club on time back into the concourse. Wait. And then there's like another three or more delays. I forgot about this nonsense. I just completely forgot about it.
Evan Kirstel:Well, it's it's that it's the traveling with masks, which I feel obliged to wear. Of course, you are obliged in the airport of the planes. I think you look better in a mask. Devon, thank you. I concur, actually, but there's an Instagram handle called passenger shaming, which highlights the worst passenger behavior. And it really is all of our fault too. I mean, the civil society is breaking down. So many people are angered people that
Dave Michels:are wearing their mask though their nose picking up on top. And again, we're in a mask, you can't get me in trouble. It's just crazy. Crazy. Just Yeah.
Evan Kirstel:And there's an unprecedented outbreak of violence on airplanes. And so it's just layering on top of layering of issues. You can't rent a car. I mean, that's the latest one, try renting a car on a trip somewhere. And also cheap flights are God to see that. I mean, the capacity was cut back so much that they're trying to maximize passengers on certain routes. And the days of cheap flights are over. So it's just one giant
Dave Michels:Well, it's a great reason to work at home and I have a feeling that's going to come up in this interview with Avaya. Let's get to it.
Evan Kirstel:All right, let's do it.
god:TalkingHeadz is a semi monthly podcast with interviews. So the top movers and shakers and enterprise communications and collaboration your hosts are Dave Michaels and Evan crystal, both of which offer extraordinary services including research, analysis and social media marketing. You can find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at talking points.com. That's points with a Z and Devin curse co.com. That's KIRSTEL.
Dave Michels:Today we have with us two guests. Evan, can you believe it two guests. This is our first foursome
Evan Kirstel:I think a bonus episode and two guests. Wow.
Dave Michels:That's the bonus part. It's an extra guest that's what it is. We have with us. We'll start off with Davina a Petro llama, the director of Avaya onecloud seap as holy cow wha I think I met you more than a decade ago back when we were talking about I think it was the Mitel 65 den, one of the finest products that esna produced when you were at esna.
Davide Petramala:Dave, you got a great memory. That's right. See, my roots are from the customer experience. Everything we did was about customer experience. And I'm glad to join you now that I'm part of the Avaya team and and their public seapass platform.
Dave Michels:I have very fond memories of Esna because you gave me a cable tie that I still use. It says Esna if you remember those freebies,
Davide Petramala:he must have been one of those events at the Bellagio, the big mighty events.
Dave Michels:I don't recall. I don't recall where I got it from but I still use it as an honor to introduce our book Our next guest
Evan Kirstel:Yes, our fourth or I should say first guest Laura tratan Berry, a Marketing Pro and Avaya responsible for one cloud seapass. But our biggest fans will know her from local TV news. Welcome, Laura.
Laura Faughtenberry:Hi, welcome. Thanks for having me.
Dave Michels:Okay. Well, we're going to dive into one cloud and figure out what your a C pass thing is. And I want to start us off.
Evan Kirstel:Well, sure enough, I of course, is known for its unified communications and contact center applications, which are especially well suited for large, complex implementations. But c pads from Avaya is not as well known. So tell us, David, when did Avaya expand into seapass?
Davide Petramala:Well, that's a great question. So let me explain when we say C pass what it means for Avaya, right. So yeah, we we weren't the standalone company that talks about API's, and we're not out there evangelizing to a million developers to build the next generation use case, what we see see pass is critical to what we call the next generation total experience platform for building intelligent customer experiences. So when they acquired My company is done, Dave knew us back then it was all about this immersive user experience and delivering it through cloud regardless of where the infrastructure or the platform sit. And from a sea pass perspective, that's really what we want to be is we want to be this composable platform in a vias world. seapass is not a product, it's a platform to deliver use cases to critical issues. And we're focused 100% on issues related to customer and employee and partner experience. So that total experience area that every company we see right now are investing big money in right with you think about the we call it the experience economy, the way that businesses are differentiating this total experience element really becomes a critical area that people need need to invest and work on. And that's where we sort of evolved, we acquired three or four different assets, public cloud assets, we incubated this sort of composable core for public cloud over the last five years, we built out a global network partnered with global carriers to have inventory and access around the world. And then what we did was, we started what are called building out the Lego building blocks. So the foundation is this composable core, have, you know hundreds of different Lego building blocks to build different use cases, not necessarily, specifically, just call center and you see but use cases to solve communication issues. From those building blocks, we put layers on top, I'll call it like Lego sets, or think of it as foundational frameworks that are ready to go. And that was sort of the genesis for some of our public cloud SaaS offering. Think of spaces. It's built on this foundation that allows you to have a foundational or framework service available as is that then can be repurposed for different use cases across finance and healthcare. Same thing as our public see Cass, and you see solutions. Those are frameworks built, that can be consumed as a SaaS service, but because they're leveraging the Lego building blocks underneath, we now have this agile public cloud infrastructure that could be customized to meet any businesses requirements. And that's what we're seeing is, look at the in the moment experiences that people are looking for, you can't have monolithic services, like you see in C cash, you have to have very agile composable services to meet those dynamic and ever changing requirements,
Dave Michels:then, that's a great idea there. Yes,
Davide Petramala:yes, yes. So and as you said, Dave, when we originally launched it, it was under the name Xang. But that was really just about incubating the concept of innovation proving to Avaya. how innovative we could be with these assets. And that saying the name doesn't exist. It's now the core of our one cloud public.
Dave Michels:You say doesn't exist, but I have a T shirt that says it does. Let me ask you now, during the pandemic, if you notice, there was a pandemic, recently, some products at various companies kind of went into hibernation, and some kind of took off how to devise one cloud solutions do during this pandemic.
Laura Faughtenberry:So we saw growth during the pandemic, so many consumers were moving to digital channels, and companies had to respond. Technology decisions needed to be made quicker, which made software as a service and Platform as a Service solutions and the use of API's so important. So as businesses tried to adjust, we kind of met them there. And we were able to build the solutions they needed to solve their new and evolving problems on our platform, sometimes doing it even overnight. And all the customers had to do was subscribe to the solutions in the cloud, which made it easy and quick for them to make that transition.
Davide Petramala:Yeah, and I think to Laura's point, what happened with the pandemic, two major issues, you had to have agility and speed because We had chaos and problems popping up everywhere. So you know, I give you the example. Everyone thought, oh, office is closed, you know what I need to I dynamically need people who to work from home. Okay, that's great. So that's the easy part, I can give me a license or remote access, right that that seemed to be pain point, how do I provide remote workers access to be able to work from home, but here came the bigger issue. All of a sudden, their call centers couldn't handle the massive volumes of spikes that never even though they're working from home, if you can't answer the calls, what do you do? And all of a sudden, people were calling in about questions that they weren't even maybe the agents weren't even qualified to do because these are new circumstances. So the ability with cloud of ability with a composable platform to look at the problem, right capacity, perfect. And elastic cloud immediately gives you elasticity to deal with that issue. Now new content, new product, I have to be able to answer questions that my agents can answer. So can I layer in automation? can I access data. So this composable er c path, the composable foundation became the immensely important because it allowed us to not go in, like you said, the people didn't want to buy products, they didn't care about products, they cared about massive issues that needed to be solved immediately. So the agility of being able to give them a service, turn it on. And by the way, when we turn it on and be a word for a week, but a week later, they had a bigger issue or something else evolved. So having the agility to modify and keep improving, became critical. Anything related to inbound and outbound automation at scale, cloud IVR, cloud deflection, mass event notification, and those frameworks. We're doing things like contact tracing, COVID, test results, vaccination, appointment reminders, all these things just emerged. And having the ability to have a framework and just modify it based on a campaign became immensely important for us. And the testament was the amount of customers that leveraged it, and the amount of feedback they gave us on how valuable it was for them.
Evan Kirstel:I bet. So Laura, how did Avaya one cloud plays such a critical role during the pandemic, when all your customers were in such a time of need and help?
Laura Faughtenberry:Yeah, so we saw a lot of organizations didn't have their own IT staff or they didn't have enough people in their IT departments or their IT departments were just stretched too thin already. And so we introduced experienced builders, which were members of our team who could build the solutions they needed to solve their new and evolving problems on our platform. And so the needs of employees and customers were changing, right work from home was mandated, as Dominic mentioned, curbside pickup became crucial for many businesses, financial service providers needed to quickly digitize call centers were under crisis, most weren't prepared to work to address the work from home change that was needed. And so all of those things were just were just looming, and they needed a solution fast. And so we were able to provide the layered innovation and digital technology. That was a must have.
Dave Michels:I gotta go back to something Davide said earlier doesn't seem to take long with via conversations these days for the word composability to come up. So via talks a lot about composability. So let me just take a guess here, that your C pass and C Kas story intersects with composability. Is that correct? Laura?
Laura Faughtenberry:Yes. So previously, we talked about UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS in silos. But the beauty of Avaya is one cloud offering is that we bring them all together in our AI powered experience platform. And so with composability, you have the ability to create unique journeys for customers. And you can create interactions, inbound and outbound interactions that build off one another. So when you do that, you can allow customers to have everything they want before they ask for it. So they can segment themselves, they can choose the experience they want. Right then in there.
Davide Petramala:Yeah, and I think this highlights having the merge together is critically important. Because what see past becomes that composable core is the force multiplier to our our core SAS services, right. So instead of a silo eucast and C cas, you can have the frameworks there, and they can be intermingled together through seapass. So I could have video being leveraged internally, as well as externally my call center by being able to compose those into different use cases for customer and employee engagement. So what we think why it's so important is as I mentioned before, companies No longer are going to accept monolithic services that only do one thing. They're looking for services that are open, right open and architected to be able to interoperate with different environments, because when we talk about experiences, engagements, you're talking about connecting to AI connecting to data so and being able to take a process that might be relevant for internal but also external use cases. So people think of virtual agents as outgoing use cases for people calling into a call center but at the same time We're seeing massive growth internally leveraging a virtual agent, or virtual use cases for HR and it right. So we don't see the siloed approach. We see the sort of composable frameworks intermingling together and creating value. And it's, it's really proven out for us in the last year.
Evan Kirstel:Well, I'm a little confused, which will be no surprise to Dave Michaels here. But I thought that all sea paths provider and offer the same basic level of API promise or definition, how is composability different?
Davide Petramala:Well, composability is more than the standard concept of C pass. In fact, the better c pass players are you morphing to do more and more we call composability. At the core of that is the access to API's, right, I'm going to expose all these Lego building blocks to give you the art of the possible to build anything. But I also want to be able to instead of making you start from scratch, I'm going to give you pre built frameworks think about a SaaS services that you can immediately get going right to market right away. And then composability allows me to take pieces and mix them together. So those frameworks can be one plus one to give you three, as well as adding API's. On top of that maybe to extend the functionality, let's say have a video service into a healthcare database or into a CRM, like salesforce.com. So composability is going to give you a much more agile speed here to market launch, because you'll have the frameworks already there to build out your foundation. And it allows you to have a little bit more of a focus on that in the moment experience when you're building what I'll call customer experiences, right? So instead of saying, here's my Lego, my Lego blocks go at it, I'm going to give you a bunch of Lego sets, pick the one that makes most sense for you. And then take a bunch of blocks red and white to customize it to meet your needs. So
Dave Michels:Ah ha. So you admit then you admitted that one size does not fit all
Davide Petramala:100% one size does not fit all, it's all about each customer and each company have different requirements and giving them the ability to meet those needs. Based on that composable sort of service gives them the agility to sort of create customized solution, it's true, the larger you go, the larger that statement is true. Because even within a company, they have different customer segments that have different requirements, you can't have a one size fits all, even with your own customers, you have to be able to have the agility to compose and have unique experiences across your own customer segments.
Laura Faughtenberry:Yeah, and when you think about the customers of our of our clients, like think about retail as a for instance, you need to do some shopping, sometimes you want to go in store, after the pandemic, you might be more likely to want to use pickup services or delivery services. But you don't always want one of those options, you might, you know, sometimes want to run in the store to grab something quickly. And other times place that order online for pickup. So you have to be able to have these kind of solutions that really does fit any need at any time. There's no way that one size fits all. And I
Evan Kirstel:hear that Avaya powers, many of the largest, most sophisticated contact centers on the planet. I've talked to some of them personally. But is any of the sea pads or composability useful to normal sized operations or enterprises?
Laura Faughtenberry:Yes, the beauty of seapass is that it can help any sized business in practically any industry. So one of the best things about Avaya onecloud see past is that you don't have to rip out your existing infrastructure, you can layer it in, which allows you to scale based on your needs. So with smaller companies, you can use it with larger companies you can use it doesn't matter. You can scale according to what you need, because you're only paying for what you're consuming. And so it's composable, too. So any business problem you have, you can compose a communications framework solution that solves your issues.
Davide Petramala:Yeah, I mean, even for smaller companies, what we're seeing is having the ability to layer in over the top services frameworks that they don't have to buy no technical debt, they simply consume, like in the larger companies, it makes sense because you're not adding a massive amount of footprint and complexity to the existing architecture that just may not support it, right. So you can layer it in for smaller companies, they might just not even have services or prior to this, it could even afford it to sort of layer in some of these advanced, experienced technologies. So now they have the they have the luxury of being able to look at a framework customize it to meet their needs, because that cost is optimized based on consumption. So it's a it's not a one size fits all in terms of service delivery, but it is sort of your size fit price model because of consumption and the way it's consumed and priced out.
Dave Michels:This all sounds too theoretical. I need some examples. I want some success stories. How about some pandemic use cases?
Davide Petramala:Yeah, for sure. So I'll give you three or four good examples in the heat of the moment and give an exam In Canada, we had a province who just basically the provincial hotline just couldn't handle the wealth of calls and people panicking. What are the conditions for COVID? What do I do? What are the symptoms, right? So instantly over a weekend, we were able to light up an elastic cloud IVR, that did deflection to their website, that it was born because that website was dynamic, and the data was changing on a daily basis, right. So we were instantly able to alleviate those ring hold the answer that created more panic, do call deflection to a site that was dynamic and changing. And then from there, they started adding more and more features like screening, COVID, screening, access to where they can go to get their latest test. So they they solve one problem. And they started adding more and more use cases, again, without upgrading disrupting, or changing their existing call center, they create a massive value on their call center without actually touching or affecting it. And they were able to resolve an issue with the same thing over in Harris County, I think it's like the third biggest county in the US in the heat of COVID. They were just basically buried because they just didn't have enough bodies to contact people about positive test results. So same thing over a weekend, we were able to light up our framework was our mass event framework, which was HIPAA compliant, right, secure, tap into their data. And we were able to take like a five day turnaround time to contact someone into a couple of hours, not only a couple hours, we were also because, again, it's connected to our network and digital channels, we were able to sort of call people text people and email people. So they went from less than 20% response rate after six days, which could mean that we even spread it further to contacting people within the day and getting a response rate over 50%, because it kept contacting as well as it used language is they're able to customize it based on their language and cultural requirements, things of that nature. Could you imagine the old the old way of buying a product scoping it out, it would take months before they implement. And by the time they implemented, the use case was gone, they were able to implement something right away, and then keep modifying the language support the ribboning of the different channels that became feedback, they got feedback, and they just kept evolving it over and over. Last example is the University of Nebraska Medical Center, they became an epic center for people to get information on COVID and what to do, and they were able to use use it for two things inbound and outbound automation to the free at their call center free up their medical center that we're dealing with people in the hospital, they were doing automation for test results, as well as automation, where people could call in and find out where to go get tested symptoms, if it was contact tracing, how to contact the tracer and how to report so they were able to automate inbound and outbound processes at scale to address the issue. And all of those services. By the way, none of them have been decommissioned. They were more they started using them for vaccine use cases when they did vaccine notification. And now they're just using them for regular routine automation. In the case of the medical center of Nebraska, they're still using that call deflection IVR to be able to answer questions and free up the front desk for live engagement. So they never remove it. They just keep modifying or changing the use case where it can deliver automation value. Amazing.
Evan Kirstel:So it sounds like speed and time to market is a critical piece of the composable seapass story at Avaya. So would you agree or what are some other examples of drivers and benefits to your customers?
Laura Faughtenberry:Yeah, definitely agree. I mean, obviously, speed is very, very important. And then I love that it's so easy to scale. So you're only charged on what you consume. So businesses can easily adjust according to their demand. But then they can also continuously improve and change their solutions as their business problems evolve or shift. So this is something where you're not just creating something and setting it up and walking away, you're coming back and you're looking at it and you're improving it so that your customers are getting the best experiences that they can based on whatever they want whenever they want it.
Dave Michels:So you're in the right place at the right time, the pandemic actually probably worked in your favor, at least in the sea pass one, one cloud story favor. Now what you expect to see ongoing growth or is it all over?
Davide Petramala:Now, obviously, what the pandemic did was highlighted how important the experience economy is, in fact, it sort of showcased that the only way to differentiate because now we all were working from home doing online shopping, we could go in, not go in, it was all about the experience. The experience economy is relevant, and it's here to stay and when as stores open up the expectation of that type of customer experience. And in the moment experience is not going to go away. It's going to be retained. And we've seen this with our customers is, as I mentioned before, they're not turning off the services they realize, hey, I need to drive a better and greater customer variances because it's the only way to retain customer loyalty, customer engagement, they want to feel connected to your organization. So we're seeing tremendous investment, and growth around what we'll call customer experience, right. And we're seeing this within organizations, they're, they're evolving and creating what we'll call fusion teams. What these fusion teams are, is a combination of domain experts, HR, sales, marketing, customer service, customer support in it. So instead of trying to outsource and buying products and doing big projects, these fusion teams have the agility to look at a requirement, see a problem solve the problem. We've seen this massive growth, Laura and I were doing these things called customer experience workshops. We didn't want it a big technology. But we're seeing companies all over the world, engage with us and want to do these workshops where they can brainstorm on where they can improve, or where they can drive more value in customer experience. And it's not just about upgrading a contact center, it could be layering in more innovation into a contact center, it might be a whole new use case around employee engagement and customer engagement. But what are the problems? How can we solve them? And how can they evolve and more importantly, the pandemic, reiterated how important customer feedback was, and how feedback needs to be fed back into improving the process. So we see tremendous growth across verticals, right. In the pandemic. Yeah, there was growth in government, and health care. But now we're seeing this in education, finance, right? retail, they're all looking at how do I drive a better experience to differentiate myself?
Dave Michels:Alright, so we've talked about the pandemic past, we've talked about the pandemic future. What about now? Is there any immediate opportunity for one cloud composability that you're going after?
Laura Faughtenberry:Yes, there, we're seeing a lot of new use cases pop up. Some of the new ones are free workstation locator and auto logoff. So as people are moving back to the offices or going back to the office sometimes and moving away from remote work, companies are needing ways to keep the data secure, and make sure that their employees can come in maybe they don't have an assigned desk anymore. Maybe it's they need to find a workstation for the day. Or maybe they need to make sure that when someone walks away from their desk, it automatically logs them off. those are those are some of the new use cases we're
Dave Michels:seeing. I think a good feature would be that if Evan approaches the desk and kind of logs them. Thank you. Thank you, I'll put that requested.
Davide Petramala:The other thing that the Lord highlights is yes, so we've got people working from home or offices or opening up in a hybrid approach. But you know, we started the pain point of connectivity. So yes, the technology might be worked, but it might not be optimized for real time communications. And when more gaming because of the pandemic and more people using real time applications, you're seeing the network's just bogged down in performance not be the same. So the ability to layer in automation, virtual engagement with live engagement offloads, a lot of that network traffic, as well as in the via one cloud will leveraging some of these composable network assets for optimization. And then when you look at being able to layer in a lot of automation without actually ripping and replacing any of the technology, especially as they open up again, right? And they don't need the complexity of like, I got to do a cloud upgrade, how do I just layer in the technology, this is going to be massive growth. And we're seeing that right, like, Okay, I know, I need automation to compliment live engagement. And I needed at scale, but I'm not taking on that technical debt. So we see this as our composer, not just see pass, but see pass a composable piece with remote agents, and analytics and transcription on live engagement. These are all pieces that will create value, that it can be layered in without disrupting what they're doing is going to have massive value
Evan Kirstel:amazings. And we require every guest on the podcast to talk about how AI will make the world a better place. But in all seriousness, David, how will AI help customers in the seapass? context? Yeah,
Davide Petramala:that's a great question. And I love talking about because to me, AI is the game changer. Because when you look at what customers expect, they don't want basic connections. The consumer says, Oh, I added a digital channel, I added this, that's not what they want. They want intelligent experiences, they're going to make them feel successful. So AI will be critical to everything that people build. Right? It's not about when people look at when they want to deal with a company. They don't want complex they want simple, but they don't want basic. They like when you call someone that you know who I am, and that level of personalization, but also, protecting and respecting my privacy. AI will be a critical part of that where it will be a key component in all the different engagement touchpoints that customers build. In fact, that's why when you look at our composable architecture, we call it our AI workflow designer. It's about embedding Ai inbound and outbound automation. So it's not just about, hey, how do I automate when you call in? And how do I automate when I call out, but how do I leverage AI to make that experience when we connect, to be rich, is simple and fulfilling on that experience. It is a core component to anything that we build or provide our customers.
Dave Michels:So let me ask a little bit about what kind of customers are suitable for this, because there's a lot of confusion these days about the cloud journey and where people are in the cloud journey.
Davide Petramala:So is this something for customers that have already transitioned to see Kaz? Because we talk about sea pass and z cash together? Or does it also work with your customers that are still on our premises based or hosted solution? That's the value of our composable. One cloud story is that it's not tethered to a massive cloud journey. It's about delivering cloud as a consumable service based on what your requirement is. So yes, if you move to the via one cloud, you have all this composability to customize your experience in that journey. But if you don't, and many of our customers aren't, they have big massive call center infrastructures that there is no ROI just to uplift and shift, what they're looking for is new use cases, new opportunities to create value around the business. So it makes sense of just layering this it in on top of what already exists. And that's important because even some of our customers admittedly not just be Avaya. They might have five agents that are cloud 1000s of agents on prem at Avaya, and maybe a remote call center in the Philippines. It's another vendor. Can I layer in innovation across all those environments? And the answer is yes, that's what our seapass are composable core that's global in nature, right allows us to do is allows it to be consumable everywhere, across disparate environments, pure cloud, on prem or hybrid.
Evan Kirstel:Exciting, because it seems like everyone these days thinks they are a C pass provider. My brother's
Dave Michels:a C pass provider.
Evan Kirstel:Oh, yes, we actually get in on that. But it is one of the most exciting categories and technology today. But how is Avaya different than its peers? Yes. So
Laura Faughtenberry:we've got more than just the C pass offering alone. So we've got the one cloud AI powered experience platform. So when you combine it with things like seek has as an example, it can orchestrate the entire customer journey, adding experiences in that are composed in the moment. So we've got other solutions that you can leverage to just really make a difference
Davide Petramala:to Laura's point. Yes, see past is core to our go to market. But it's we don't see it as a standalone go to market initiative, we see it as a big core to our overall go to market and our go to market is around delivering that total experience platform, being able to solve solutions around customer experience, partner experience, employee experience, driving intelligent rich experiences that create better value around the whole ecosystem of stakeholders within your organization. Right so again, as she said, it's it's not about we're just out there selling API's are saying, here's our global network here API's build what you want know, we're here about how can we help solve problems around your stakeholders in your business, and how we can help them engage? It's really about defining that total experience platform to drive greater value specially in this market that we live in which is this called customer experience or the experience economy. How can we create value for companies to address that issue?
Dave Michels:All right, so let's do the obligatory auto customers get started. You have an answer that one.
Laura Faughtenberry:So they can go to avaya.com forward slash c pass, or contact Steve has sales@avaya.com. And then we also, we offer workshops all the time. So Davina mentioned earlier on, we have these to our custom workshops that are available, and we do those free of charge just to get the customers and potential customers just kind of thinking about ways to solve this business problem.
Evan Kirstel:I love it. I love the Yeah, I love the idea of a workshop I might actually participate in the workshop. What do you think Dave? I am an electrical engineer by degree I would love to beef up my developers.
Dave Michels:The only way a two hour workshop with Evan sounds good is it was expected to be a four hour.
Laura Faughtenberry:But congratulations guys, in all seriousness, you're helping customers in this difficult time. If you haven't noticed the pandemic is not over sadly. And we've never seen more demand for transformation and innovation, with businesses helping their customers. So well done and well done in reinventing your team at Avaya and this really challenging period. So it's very impressive to see.
Davide Petramala:And we appreciate it. It's exciting. I mean, Lord knows. I look at my team which is called the experience builders. Nothing gave us more pride and more joy in being able to take technology that was homegrown in our organization to solve some of these had massive issues that companies were dealing with, again, this composable cloud that allowed us to have that agility to meet the market needs and the dynamic changing market needs. So yeah, we appreciate it.
Dave Michels:What I really like here is, is this all happened on my shift? Like, I can't take any credit for it. But I remember Yes, you can take full credit, debit, or credit. But But no, but I remember when I had enterprise Connect, I can't remember what year it was in 1903, or something like that. But I remember when Avaya announced saying, and it was kind of like, what is it and everyone was kind of confused by it and what is it going to be? And it's really grown into not only a very interesting, capable solution, but it's kind of the future of Avaya is
Davide Petramala:really what it is. You got it.
Evan Kirstel:Wow, that's a bold statement.
Davide Petramala:its core. It's the composable core to our one cloud strategy.
Dave Michels:Well, very good. Well, thank you for joining us. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks.
Evan Kirstel:Wow, what a great discussion with Avaya. I had no idea they were such a significant player in the sea paths market and had so much composability it's all
Dave Michels:about composability.
Evan Kirstel:I look up that word again when I forget it. But yes, it composability is an exciting technology architecture. And I see good things coming from Avaya in the future. Who's Our next guest. I think we have an interesting company. In our next episode as well. Our next
Dave Michels:Talking Heads interview is going to be with Darren Shriver, he's the founder of 2600 hertz, the most confusing company out there in our space because nobody knows what the name means. And
Evan Kirstel:I knew the frequency in hertz, that was used by at&t as a steady signal to mark current
Dave Michels:running that we have nothing to talk about in our next episode.
Evan Kirstel:I just googled it. So I
Dave Michels:thought we're gonna find out about the name. And we're going to find out because we're going to ask them straight up is 2600 hertz, a US company or a seapass? company? Because nobody seems to know.
Evan Kirstel:exciting, very mysterious can't wait. All right. You want some information? So get a conversation. Man. You gotta get out of here. phone in your phone, No, man.