Late last month Avaya held its Partner Connect Conference themed ‘Relentless Pursuit To Win” in Nairobi. In attendance was Nidal Abou Ltaif who is the Avaya VP for Middle East and Africa who shared lots on what the converged communications heavyweight has been up to in Africa. I have to confess I really did not know much about Avaya until that point except that I had seen lots of their communications equipment in hotels and large corporates in and beyond Kenya.

Some of the interesting highlights on Avaya include the fact that their converged communications offerings are used by Airtel in their contact centres throughout 16 countries. In Kenya, there are over 200 users on Airtel’s Avaya contact centre. In Nigeria, Avaya rolled out a unified communications system for the Government there that has over 3000 users. They have deployed unified communications systems via their partners for major corporates in Kenya like Kenya Airways,  Barclays Bank, CFC Stanbic Bank, and many others. Avaya has also acquired over 100 new customers in Kenya over the past year making it their largest market in Africa outside Egypt and South Africa. For sure, the enterprise space is where Avaya has done remarkably well in Africa across many sectors.

Going forward, and over the last few years, Avaya is now pushing its offerings for SMEs in Kenya and throughout Africa to tap into what is arguably their biggest market opportunity considering that is where the largest volume of business is concentrated. Impressively, Avaya has unified communications solutions that span the full stack and can be integrated with third-party systems in a modular manner. Currently, Avaya has over 6,000 customers in Africa, and growing using their solutions. In addition, they have SME offerings that can be used in organisations as small as 2 users to 2000 users.