Composability Powers the Next Wave of Communications Growth

welcome to z cast everybody i'm zeus caraval from zk research and i'm your host and i'm back for another one of my thought leadership videos uh i'm here with simon harrison cmo of avaya simon we're here live at enterprise connect 2022 uh it's great to be back live i think this has been a show in the making for uh the better part of two years so how you how you been doing oh you know it's been a little bit busy to say the least uh but yeah it's great to have the opportunity to chat to you uh lots of exciting things that have come from what has been somewhat untoward we wouldn't have expected what happened clearly but uh yeah it's been it's been good it's been busy for the right reasons i think yeah so being here at enterprise connect we're going to talk a little bit about communications one of the big themes here was this concept of composability which we've talked about before uh before we get started though i'm going to want to give a quick shout out to my uh media partner ewik all z casts are done in conjunction with the ewiki speaks program so you and i were on a panel yesterday and this is uh this topic of composability has become a big theme in the communications industry what is composability simon why does it matter well it's an interesting concept that perhaps it's not necessarily born of something entirely new combinatorial innovation is something we've seen the value of where we take more than one application the combined application value uh creates that one plus one equals five kind of effect but the the benefits of the cloud consumption model the various things you know such as storage and compute and the ways in which we can exploit the power of the api economy has changed the game in terms of this composability thing where you can start to realize the speed to value of core applications and then through purpose-built extensibility and the power of the uh api economy start to create for really quite precise use cases and that not just for customers but for staff too that being two sides of the same coin fundamentally that's kind of the basics of this thing and it's really quite exciting in terms of the opportunity it's created yeah i think you know the what the pandemic did was uh in fact we may look back at this era the pandemic and realize just how much innovation we drove into technology in this time period you brought up an interesting point that what the combinatorial combinatorial effect of bringing these components together and being able to compose experiences allows us to do more and provide a better experience for more people and i think if you look at the the massive number of communications tools we had prior to the pandemic they were really built for your traditional knowledge worker or your traditional contact center agent didn't really work for everybody though and as we sent people home and we had to learn over uh these types of tools and we had to uh we had to we you know we had to do court proceedings and we had to do telehealth and stuff like that we learned very quickly that these stock applications didn't work right yeah absolutely yeah i mean i i've used the phrase a little a few times now but it's kind of there isn't an app for that has become ever so prevalent you know the reality is that when it comes to the kind of use cases we needed to support suddenly quite urgently you know i mean the i would argue the pandemic didn't necessarily change the trajectory of iran but it certainly accelerated it created that urgency around trying to support quite precise use cases things that we couldn't have predicted enabling people to be productive where they are um creating all kinds of new challenges and trying to figure out new routes to growth new routes to retaining and keeping customers happy and so on giving rise to what was an extraordinary array of ways in which you could uh consider it a challenge but also an opportunity to compose things for for for those kind of scenarios and that that's really been i guess in a way as you say the innovation that's been driven by this thing has been quite shocking quite surprising actually yeah so you use the a-word app right and uh prior to the pandemic if we had to go build an application we'd ask our developer yes we go through this process of taking six months a year two years to build an app uh but that's not good enough anymore is it no no i mean you know you're going to get so far with an app and even if it's a very modern microservices based atmosphere you have to be clear about microservices they are a more efficient way more effective way to create an application that really is still needs to be monolithic by design because you don't expose your micro services to your customers that'd be like giving them the source code right so you can create something very efficient very effective to be able to innovate with it quickly but that takes you so far in terms of these use cases and what you need to do is think about how you can take that accelerated core application but compose additional benefits and features that deliver on these quite precise use cases using the power of apis sometimes extensibility based on design so we've seen technology partners as part of our experience building program that have built applications that compose very precisely well with what might be something like the avaya spaces application that is a is uh by design in terms of principle enables that combinatorial thinking but also when you want to just exploit the power of it is a common commonly accessed api based service natural language understanding whatever from a predictive intent from one of these uh mega vendors that offer a lot of that being able to combine that to create something you know where one plus one actually equals 10 in lots of ways if you've got the right kind of platform approach yeah so you mentioned spaces and that's a good example of something you can build on your api platform but do you have an example where maybe one or more of your experience builder partners teamed up and we're able to create that one plus one equals three type of model yeah i mean we we've uh we don't want to be experts in everything exist right we're not gonna be experts in online education we're not gonna be experts in in perhaps uh voice recognition and facial id recognition and voice biometrics and those kind of things we understand these things we're pretty pretty good as a technology company but why not empower the the technology partners that are creating these kind of innovations in that space to be able to come you know create something new with our technology so uh as a via is a basic application of a platform application that is powered by c-pass and enables you to repurpose the video uh uh engagement features voice features sorry features chat features uh to be combined with something like the online learning capability that's come from one of our technology partners called tool wire was a was a great example of combinatorial innovation you know composability by design where they took what we thought was great about the app and said hold on a second we don't want to just recreate a classroom learning experience for students and teachers why don't we go ahead and re-imagine what's possible there thinking about the way students learn best the way teachers reach their students best and they combine to compose the solution using tool wires core online education solution to create something that was really quite groundbreaking actually something you couldn't have imagined and then in addition to that you know the guys over at journey.ai said you know what we do a lot of wonderful things around keeping people safe you know in terms of the security aspects and perhaps thinking about students maybe we should be composing solutions together and so it was wonderful to see that these two companies that where the experienced builder brad sorry experience better badge easy for me to say quite proudly come together and say let's compose a solution together and the some of the parts of what they've created is exactly as we say it's the multiplication of the benefits of all of these apps individually has become quite astounding and is a great example of a composed solution yeah in fact i'm pretty familiar with what you've done with experienced builders and i would say i like the structure of it because it does embrace that concept of composability where you can have avaya as the underlying api platform you can have tool wire bring the education piece you can bring have journey ai bring the authentication piece and then on top of that through low code no code tools you could have a student bring their expertise and then customize it even further so here's a case where historically i'm not even sure you could have had that many constituents come together and build an application but now everybody does what they do best and you've got a solution that's optimized for the student absolutely right and it's a great point you're making which is we don't want to be the experts in all of these disciplines what we want to do is enable those end users citizen developers as you touch on loco no code support with what into the to be able to create what they think good looks like to be able to take what is the core uh premise of our applications our platform our buy one cloud platform and extend that in all kinds of wonderful ways to create use for use cases we could never have imagined and we wouldn't want to be entirely responsible for we want to ensure the others can do it can can cope with developing themselves so let's pivot a little bit to this concept of platform i know avaya has spent the better part of the last really several years building a cloud native platform from the ground up right to support this concept and uh core to that is something you guys are calling your mpc your your media process what does that do and why is that important well it's it's interesting when you look at the way the market uh supports collaboration communication collaboration you've got contact center applications unified communications apps and there are companies collaborations yeah and everyone's talking about them coming together well i kind of look at that as the the wrong way in if you consider when you look at voice video chat social engagement all these ways in which you want to communicate and then you consider that being a common element across all of these apps whether you're in a contact center environment a meeting environment perhaps it's something that a customer has composed they've created a web page based video feature maybe it's a doctor and they want to engage with patients and then consider our delivery applications put together with that triage of the buyer the rider and the the restaurant and ad infinitum all of these apps are all about communicating and collaborating do you do you think there's an efficient and effective way to create what is common across all these applications in each of the applications and then thinking about all the ai you'd want to infuse in the different ways in each application it's going to become you're going to get lots of technical debt out there as people start to realize the the benefits of these integrated applications so the media processing core does something really important it takes what is common to all of these applications and makes it part of this service that is forming the heart and soul of the one cloud platform and what that means is you get it doesn't matter it starts to look like it doesn't matter where a voice engagement or chat engagement or video engagement start and ends it becomes kind of less of a key focus area so you can kind of create whatever you need to at that end user experience end but you can also rely on the fact the ai infused within this core layer whether it's transcription translation noise cancelling uh you know green screening upscaling all those things immediately becomes available to whatever these applications look like now and in the future that's a different approach and that really as you've touched on is perhaps a realization of this more modern cloud native application design that we've in this luxurious position to be able to realize that perhaps in some ways the the way that the sas based applications that are delivered today are available today have had to grow from quite a few years of realizing uh their core application perhaps even some may say a bit more monolithic design and it's a big deal that you know when we think about the platform we think about we're supporting composability we think about the future of this space that the media processing core is is probably the most important part of what we need what buyers need to realize the future in this experience economy that we're always talking about right yeah so when i think of avaya right the media processing core is obviously a critical nobody does media like avaya's media right you've been doing it for better part of 100 years i think but you're as you mentioned you're not an ai company you're not a security company so how does this this cloud native back end almost let you compose your own back end yes with through partners right so who are some of the partners you use on the ai side and what do they bring to the table in this cloud native offering that you have yeah i mean we we are pretty much working with every major vendor obviously google amazon in terms of lex uh watson all of those vendors that support natural language understanding understanding intents predicting analytics capabilities we work with our we have a co-operation approach with a lot of the vendors that we see out there we are effectively very tuned into the fact that when it comes to customers they have already invested in a lot of you know cloud platforms and ecosystems there may be an idea best shop there may be an azure shop and they've started to build their own apps using microservices perhaps native to those environments so our application ambition is to be and you know to com provide that kind of complementary combinatory innovation to what they've already done even considering what they've had for a while where they might have to consider that bimodal approach of letting things still carry on doing what they do well but now start to add some of that more modern innovation to it so it's an open platform it's an open cloud it's an open kind of you know application not integration but you know kind of composer composer kind of type of environment that we're we're really quite focused on our environment yeah it's interesting you do partner with every google amazon i think you were the first nvidia maxine partner as well right it's that's interesting that you're able to bring these best of breed components in now if i'm uh if i'm part of the audience watching this verified attendant enterprise connect i'm going to hear a lot about this term composability almost every vendor says they are yes right and so if i'm a cio and i'm trying to figure out what's my what's my platform that i go forward with you know the hybrid work era how do i really know that the vendor i'm choosing truly is composable or is this part of marketing speak that's a great question i mean the fundamentally when you look at the perhaps the the underlying foundation to being in a compose solutions it's driven by communications platform as a service as a core ingredient yeah also a lot of cpas exactly right and uh and that that as a core platform is something that you should be looking at your vendor to make sure that they're supporting that kind of ability to not just you know cpas has matured it used to be about cloud ivr and messaging solutions and so forth but when you can create like we did with our covert application a complete user experience a workflow an integrated solution that's hipaa compliant to create an automated very cool solution that uses prediction and natural language understanding all within hours you realize how c-pass is a very different animal today and that is the core you know kind of on the shopping list that you should be thinking about when it comes to your communication and collaboration strategy that will take the lid off of any of the other core applications you may be considering whether it's ccas ucas workstream collaboration the important part part of the the whole design is to have that platform approach with that communication sort of ability how i with the low code no code speak to value for end users citizen developers not just you know your typical developers being the the important ingredient in the whole solution yeah yeah you brought up the covet example i'd like that one the other really fascinating example that you guys had was with the health ministry in egypt where they created a sign language uh interpretation application for the citizens almost overnight that to me that was that was pretty fascinating so yeah all right simon well uh i think this brings us to the end of our video the this was a fascinating discussion i think uh composability i think in this communications industry we're really at the beginning begin the beginnings of it now and i think it's really exciting for the end user audience because i think you're going to see more innovation in this space uh driven faster than ever before and i'm really excited about the the future this in fact i've i think this is the most exciting time i've seen in communications and you've been in this in a long time and i'm sure you agree i have to agree it's been perhaps in terms of the way the customers are approaching us the way they have this ambition to realize the power of apps and their apps teams you know they don't want to have a certified consultant approach on a particular bit of your communications technology they want an apps approach means the market is kind of coming to us see us we're seeing yeah and it's a big deal i think it's an exciting new new world that we're realizing yeah well one of your competitors wrote a book called ask your developer i think that's a little bit of old-school thinking now i think it's ask your composer uh because composability is the future of communication so simon harrison thank you very much for joining me always a pleasure i'm zeus caraval from zk reaches don't forget to click to subscribe and i'll see you next time on zcast

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