Avaya Experience Builders A ‘Lego Kit’ For Partners In ‘Experience Economy’
‘Experience Builders is really just an extension of that down to the CPaaS capabilities, where we can take those fundamental components or building blocks and do something interesting with them that just hasn’t been done before,’ one Avaya partner tells CRN.
Unified communications giant Avaya is launching Experience Builders, a program that brings together resources and co-development support for enterprises creating custom solutions for the “experience economy,” the company said.
Experience Builders, first revealed in October and formally launched on Monday at Avaya Engage 2021, creates a network for Avaya services, partners, technology developers, customers and citizen developers in an extensive global network to help enterprises build the custom communications and collaboration solutions they need, Simon Harrison, senior vice president and CMO at Avaya, told CRN.
Experience Builders uses Avaya’s Hybrid Cloud Services, Omnichannel Services and AI Services, as well as the Avaya OneCloud platform for that includes Avaya OneCloud UCaaS, Avaya OneCloud CCaaS, and Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, according to the company.
“What we’re trying to say with Experience Builders is, if you just try and deploy things like how you’ve done simple apps in the past, you’re probably going to miss a lot of good stuff,” Harrison said. “We’ve got lots of customers that are trying to build experiences -- they’re trying to be outcome-based.”
Avaya’s open APIs are like “Lego kits” for partners, who can build the exact product the kit advertises, or they can compose something brand new, said David Lover, vice president of strategy and technology at solution provider ConvergeOne, one of Avaya’s largest partners.
ConvergeOne is an Experience Builder that is using Avaya OneCloud Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) as the architecture behind its C1 Conversations solution, an enterprise-grade platform that lets businesses integrate all voice and digital technologies into existing platforms, while automating interactions.
Customers aren’t often “ripping and replacing” technology, but rather, layering on newer technologies. The Experience Builder framework allows ConvergeOne to help its customers transform on their own timelines, Lover said.
ConvergeOne right now is creating custom solutions for customers around the safe return to office and tracking. Some customers have needed a way to track vaccinated employees, or accounting for employee locations, Lover said.
“With their open APIs, this is something that Avaya knows very well, and we certainly know how to take advantage of those things to do something maybe a little more creative for the customer,” he said. “Experience Builders is really just an extension of that down to the CPaaS capabilities, where we can take those fundamental components or building blocks and do something interesting with them that just hasn’t been done before.”
Partners using the Avaya OneCloud platform as the foundation for the creation of a communications and collaboration tool have the opportunity to integrate with their customers’ existing CRM or (enterprise resource planning) ERP tools to make a smooth workflow across several different applications, Avaya’s Harrison said.
“[There’s] the potential for a partner to increase their value per customer, add to their revenue, create more stickiness, and being able to do things that the customer then becomes quite reliant on,” he said.
The Experience Builders program currently includes more than 250 technology partners, including AI technology vendors, more than 32,000 companies in Avaya DevConnect and 154,000 registered developers, with 24,000 of them using Avaya OneCloud CPaaS. Right now, there are 7,200 channel partners and agents that are Experience Builders, according to the Durham, N.C.-based company.