Avaya completes financial restructuring, emerges from Chapter 11

Avaya Holdings has successfully completed its debt restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11*. A second amended plan for reorganisation was accepted by the US courts in late November.

“This is the beginning of an important new chapter for Avaya,” said Jim Chirico, Avaya’s President and CEO on December 18. “In less than a year since the commencement of our Chapter 11 restructuring, Avaya has emerged as a publicly traded company with a significantly strengthened balance sheet. Overall, we reduced our prior debt load by approximately US$3 billion, and we exit today with more than US$300 million in cash on our balance sheet. The reduction of our debt and certain other long-term obligations will also improve annual cash flow by approximately US$300 million compared to fiscal 2016.”

“We have the flexibility we need to invest in the large and growing contact centre and unified communications markets as we complete our transformation to a software, services and cloud solutions provider,” Chirico added. “With a new Board and leadership team firmly in place, Avaya is now well-positioned to execute on its growth plan and deliver the returns and value expected by our stakeholders.”

Nidal Abou-ltaif remains President, Avaya International, which covers the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) regions. In a blog post he said, "Negative selling leads to negative outcomes. Some of our competitors went down the negative-selling route, trying to put Avaya down in the hearts and minds of our customers and partners. Not only does this not work, it’s left our competitors less confident in their own abilities. End result: we’ve beaten them to the punch on key strategic accounts, with customers preferring to do business with people they trust.”

Sami Ammous, formerly lead for the Avaya Sales Engineering organisation in APAC, was named MD, ASEAN in September. Ammous is responsible for growing Avaya’s business and presence in Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, working with customers and partners to help them achieve digital transformation objectives.

In Southeast Asia, the company will focus on growing its presence, particularly in AI innovation. The company has seen successive growth in recent quarters and added over 10,000 seats on contact centre services in the region as of August 2017. Its customers include:

·       Taiwan Internet bank O-Bank, which is supported by Avaya multichannel customer engagement technologies

·      The largest insurance company in APAC, which has a private cloud run by Avaya

·       The majority of business process outsourcing companies in ASEAN

Avaya also announced in October that it will deliver emergency services communications solutions for Turkey's NGCC112 emergency number project, specifically with its eCall vehicle accident aid system. 

In October, Bosch Group expanded its partnership with Avaya to help support Bosch's Next Generation Workplace digital transformation strategy across its global operations. Avaya Private Cloud Services (APCS) signed a US$60 million agreement with Bosch to provide business communications solutions to 160,000 Bosch associates worldwide.

Under the agreement, Avaya will provide private cloud-based voice, contact centre and collaboration services, helping Bosch's central IT department to roll out standardised solutions to all Bosch group companies worldwide. Avaya's infrastructure integration solution will also provide enterprise-class assured voice services to Bosch users where they are interfacing through the Skype for Business desktop client.

Avaya has continued to win accolades during its restructuring. In August, the company was rated a Leader in the 2017 IDC MarketScape Worldwide Unified Communications and Collaboration Vendor Assessment following an evaluation of capabilities and strategies of 11 vendors that offer unified communications and collaborations technologies globally. In late September, Avaya also shared that its Avaya IP Office Platform had reached a new milestone with 600,000 systems issued to customers globally since its launch.

Explore:

Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts on Avaya's partnership with Westcon-Comstor, and its excellence award in China for contact centre-as-a-service.

Hashtag: #Celebrate2gether

*Under US law, Chapter 11 gives a company protection from creditors for a specific period so that it can reorganise.