Thread regarding Avaya layoffs

Did all of them get paid ?

Lack of “features” didn’t stop many customers migrating to SfB/Teams for UCaaS… Don’t be lulled in to feature battle, hard as it may be to swallow for many left at Avaya, sadly it’s actually not all just about the tech, Marketing and Sales play a significant role, to a large extent. Don’t get me wrong, capabilities when the rubber hits the road really matters, but it’s not the only thing…

Let's not forget.

Phase 1 of the Big Lie was to force as many clients who wouldn't say 'Fucx No" onto a Subscription Plan . WHY you ask? To create a FALSE ARR and use the ARR with Wall Street to Imply all Subscription Clients were Cloud Clients.

Phase 2 of the BIG LIE was to use the false ARR and all of the FALSE Marketing planted Pay2Play articles to raise stock price AND attract a buyer so they (BOD & C Suite) to sell the company and run.
That is WHY product was never given the resources to create an actual cloud portfolio. That is WHY ALL resources were aligned with marketing so they could hire empty minded people who excelled at Red Shiney Ball deflections because they were too self absorbed to ask any questions. That is why, when a client would ASK for Cloud they would be denied (since Avaya got them on another 1-2 yrs of a subscription deal, they could use them to report ARR and there was no need to actually fight to execute cloud). That is why Avaya is now under Chapter 11 despite ALL of the marketing planted articles claiming them to have record cloud clients and amazing growth.

Avaya didn't file for chapter 11 because of old debt. They f'd up the debt payoff schedule because of lies. Apollo needed bankruptcy to accomplish their takeover. And Apollo was able to get their way ONLY because of how much cr-p Avaya was covering up. Apollo blackmailed Avaya in broad daylight.

There was no product/solution or whatever superhero moniker they claimed One Cloud to be. (& WTF is ONE anyway? Basic 101 is public & private. So that's 2).

Not having an actual cloud anything was one thing. Yet the culture of Avaya made it so much worse. The culture stipulates that to "suceed" (relative term) people had to play along with the con.
In my book, if I can't validate and verify something i refuse to say anything other than "I don't know about that" or "I can't verify" when a customer inquired. Needless to say I set the stage for my exit because some people spent more time claiming I was wrong (I didn't claim to be not wrong. Simply requested the data to support the claim before I agreed to the propaganda tour) than they did in trying to verify what they do fiercely & confidently believed.

And, Avaya marketing believes marketing = hype. They failed to address the W & T in SWOT. They believed the O meant 'exploit' the message. They happily subscribed to "Fake it Til Ya Make It'

Everyone keeps pointing the finger everywhere other than where it belongs.

It’s marketing’s fault that they had to market non-existent product. Now it’s sales fault, they couldn’t sell non-existent product or convince enough customers to give Avaya money for old stuff.

The real problem was product, in that there wasn’t any to sell. The cloud stuff was never invested in beyond a 1.0 basic release, if that, or was someone else’s OEM with the Avaya sticker slapped on it.

The premise stuff hasn’t had a meaningful update in 10 years (FCE) and customers caught on. Even with zero percent interest they weren’t going to spend tens of thousands updating a tech stack that gave them nothing new.

Start aiming the blame where it belongs…

Where did sales go wong?

Sales Cloud Leadership would simply bully the Account Teams to distract from the lack of a solution. They would be on an endless loop of "you are stupid", "you are talking to the wrong people", and my favorite, tell the actual customer that they were stupid. As long as they could hide behind everyone else being so stupid, no one would notice the emperor had no clothes.

Was cloud hard to sell? I image that for last 4 years with 0% interest ratres busineses would spend money on new avaya phone systems. But not many customers went on boards with new avaya deployments. Where did the sales go wrong ?

The CCaaS offer isn’t even “perfect for mid market customers”. It’s overpriced, under-featured, and unreliable (they cook the uptime books by blocking large swaths of “planned maintenance” windows)

Yup.
Only likely revenue will come from base. Yet they spin their wheels offending the base by targeting all resources and messaging to mid market who will never give Avaya a chance as they have zero loyalty and won't be the guinea pig for a BK org.

Reminds me of a Doors song, the words a running round my head: This is the end, my beautiful friend, the end……