Avaya Holdings Corp. and Verint Systems Inc. today announced an expansion of their partnership to introduce cloud deployments for Avaya Workforce Engagement Management, improving customer experience through operational intelligence in the contact center. Avaya‘s suite of workforce engagement capabilities can be deployed in any manner from on-premises to cloud services supporting public, private or hybrid deployment models.

Verint and Avaya, strategic partners for nearly 15 years, currently provide omnichannel and voice contact center and WEM solutions to tens of thousands of customers worldwide, ranging from small-to-medium businesses (SMB) to large enterprises with thousands of seats. Avaya and Verint expect that their current offering will continue to satisfy a wide range of customer requirements, and ongoing co-development will further expand WEM capabilities.

Avaya IX Workforce Engagement is a new offering introduced as part of the Avaya Intelligent Xperiences - or Avaya IX - solution naming architecture unveiled this week at the company's annual ENGAGE user group conference. Based on input from customers and partners, the new naming will streamline Avaya's portfolio of solutions and reflect the wealth of experience Avaya brings to bear for customers as they transform digitally and move their solutions into the cloud.

"Avaya and Verint coming together in the cloud to provide a full range of consumption options without sacrificing capabilities or addressability is a headline moment for their joint customers and for future cloud contact center projects," said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst Customer Contact, Frost & Sullivan. "This is a compelling cloud contact center offer with strong WFO/WEM capabilities, and a significant leap forward to meet the needs of a growing market opportunity."

Avaya IX Workforce Engagement delivers the full spectrum of WEM functionality including voice call and screen compliance recording with full encryption, quality monitoring, performance management, workforce management, speech analytics, customer feedback and desktop process analytics. It includes pause and resume controls to assist with adherence to information security compliance frameworks. Customers can apply these cloud services as a stand-alone Avaya IX Workforce Engagement solution enabling existing installations of Avaya contact center technologies. Alternately, call center workloads can be migrated or implemented in the Avaya cloud alongside Avaya IX Workforce Engagement.

"The cloud consumption availability of Avaya IX Workforce Engagement helps our customers become vastly more agile than ever before in effecting and realizing outcomes from the customer experience transformation," said Chris McGugan, Avaya Senior Vice President, Solutions and Technologies. "Avaya IX Workforce Engagement enables organizations to generate a faster ROI and easily add new capabilities to bolster workforce engagement and productivity that enhances their customer experience."

"Today's announcement further extends the long and successful partnership between Verint and Avaya, and our customers can benefit from the deeper integration and joint R&D efforts to strengthen the consumption of Avaya IX Workforce Engagement alongside Avaya platforms anywhere," said John Bourne, Senior Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, Verint. "Avaya IX Workforce Engagement offers a full-featured, unified solution for both cloud and on premise contact centers to meet organizations' unique needs and budget in a true consumption-based pricing model, suitable for large, multinational enterprises and small to midsize businesses."

Key benefits of Avaya IX Workforce Engagement include:

Generate Fast Return on Investment

• Pay only for what is needed; choose a service package that meets your specific business requirements
• Minimize upfront investment and take advantage of usage-based pricing
• Quickly add new functionality as it is needed

Improve Customer Engagement and Productivity

• Securely capture, analyze and store customer and agent interactions to pinpoint areas of excellence and guide improvements
• Help every agent become a superstar through interaction evaluations

Simplify Operating Environment

• Choose from private, public, hybrid or mixed cloud deployment
• Secure, available and flexible environment
• Dynamic elastic scaling and rapid provisioning
• Secure and compliant multi-tenant architecture within public cloud deployments
• Get automatic software updates and upgrades at no additional cost or effort with no disruption to business

Innogy, a large energy company based in Germany with more than 38,000 employees, recently chose the new Avaya IX Workforce Engagement offering for its contact center. "We were faced with an imminent sustainability decision for our on-premise telephony solution with unique and complex requirements from our business to meet the needs of the customer," said Andy Parkinson, Programme Manager, Innogy Business Services UK. "We embarked on an extensive internal review and tender of our Contact Center Technologies and chose Avaya and Verint for their functionality, proven experience and their availability of key skills and the capabilities of their platforms. In partnership with one of their Cloud Partners, 4Net Technologies, they helped us deliver our Cloud Transformation Program over a 12-month period. We have been in production with around 3,000 agents for over 12 months and we feel validated in our choice of going cloud and consuming Avaya and Verint's Contact Center Avaya IX Workforce Engagement platform."