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Customer experience (CX) technologies are reaching new levels of innovation, enabling businesses to create deeper customer connections and new pathways to business growth. This innovation is transforming the modern contact center into dynamic Experience Centers, capable of enhancing customer interactions across text, email, chat, and voice channels – through enhanced automation, analytics, and of course, the ultimate game-changer, AI. Avaya has built a solid foundation to lead CX innovation by integrating advanced capabilities and AI into every facet of the customer interaction. This foundation – Avaya Experience Platform (AXP)™ – helps the world’s largest businesses establish a CX strategy built for success by bringing in next-gen technologies at a pace that best meets their needs. Whether pursuing an on-prem, cloud, or hybrid path, enterprises using AXP can benefit from an array of enhanced, AI-powered capabilities including orchestration, data analysis, and customer journey tools, and do so in a non-disruptive way.  An expansive CX ecosystem But success does not exist in a vacuum, and Avaya brings another key component essential to CX innovation: An expansive partner Ecosystem. By collaborating with a broad range of leading technology partners and AI leaders, Avaya helps enterprises gain the most advanced range of CX innovations and capabilities available. This thriving ecosystem of leading CX and Employee Experience (EX) alliance partners helps businesses drive the precise outcomes they want, with lower risks and faster results. A strong ecosystem complements Avaya’s platform, so businesses can integrate the best capabilities into a rock-solid infrastructure. It is a concept Avaya calls ‘better together.’ Comprised of hundreds of partners, Avaya’s ecosystem supports a strategy to help organizations innovate without disruption. This includes introducing AI features from tech’s top players – from Google to Microsoft to Zoom – so customers can bring in AI ‘over the top’ of their existing solutions. Our ecosystem plays a key role in Avaya’s approach to CX innovation, based on key guiding principles: Customer journey to the cloud: High-impact CX capabilities are now cloud-powered, which means enterprises need to decide how to implement the cloud while avoiding major business disruptions. Avaya’s CX approach is to ease cloud transition by offering businesses a choice, whether they employ an on-prem, cloud, or hybrid strategy. With support from a ‘Who’s Who’ of technology partners that can bring in new capabilities with speed and simplicity, Avaya’s ecosystem lets customers accelerate their journey with greater precision. Open technology: Open systems and APIs are key to driving fast, flexible deployments, and Avaya offers deep expertise with this approach. Recognizing each business has its own preferred environment, AXP was built as an open platform to easily interface with capabilities from certified partners, allowing businesses to quickly add advanced technologies as needed. Avaya has completed compliance testing with hundreds of partner solutions, fostering an open ecosystem that accelerates innovation and deployment, with many technology options for customers. Retain existing investments: More companies are concerned that the ‘rip and replace’ approach to cloud deployment means multiple steps backward before they move forward. Instead, they seek a less disruptive path. In fact, we have clients who started down a rip-and-replace path to the cloud with others, only to later turn to Avaya for a smoother, more tailored approach leveraging existing investments and customizations. Alliance partners play a vital role, bringing advanced solutions that layer in enhancements such as AI-powered virtual agents and automation, while using what still works well.   Advancing AI solutionsA prime example of our open ecosystem in action is Avaya’s decades-long partnership with Verint. The companies have been enhancing customer experiences for joint customers by combining the strengths of Verint’s AI-powered intelligent virtual agents, which deliver real-time assistance to agents with AXP. Verint adheres to Avaya’s innovation without disruption approach, enabling brands to add new features across different deployment methods while minimizing risk. The Verint Open Platform can be integrated into AXP, giving Avaya customers access to more than fifty different AI-powered virtual agents, providing advanced CX automation and analysis capabilities. Recently, the companies announced a deepening of their partnership, including access to two new Verint virtual agents that leverage automation and use GenAI to simplify and speed customer service.  Conclusion: Expanding the possibilities With deep expertise in open CX and EX innovation, Avaya and its alliance ecosystem partners are helping businesses benefit from a wider range of capabilities, expanding what’s possible. New AI-infused levels of service are leading to more satisfied customers – and to business growth. As the Avaya ecosystem flourishes, you can expect more opportunities to tap the full potential of an AI-powered platform backed by a wide range of partners.  Learn more about how to take advantage of the power of Avaya solutions, the AXP platform, and our strategic partner program, or contact us at [email protected] to discuss your specific needs. source

The new multi-agent system will go some way toward answering Marc Benioff’s criticism of Microsoft’s existing AI offering: The Salesforce CEO has said, “Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0,” referring to the ill-fated and irritating animated paperclip that once offered assistance on writing a letter in Microsoft Office. Magnetic-One has a multi-agent architecture in which one agent, the Orchestrator, directs four other agents to solve a given task. “The Orchestrator plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors, while directing specialized agents to perform tasks like operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code,” the company explained in a blog post. source

Having a Plan B is table stakes for any IT team. Rather than wait for a storm to hit, IT professionals map out options and build strategies to ensure business continuity. This may involve embracing redundancies or testing new tools for future operations. Following Broadcom’s late 2023 acquisition of VMware, numerous changes prompted customers and partners to reassess their strategies. Some delayed decisions by relying on existing VMware licenses, while others explored alternatives or ran redundancies to compare options. Forrester predicted 20% of VMware customers would leave in 2024, “exhausted by significant price hikes, degrading support, and mandatory subscription.” Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many IT teams are considering whether it’s the right time to explore VMware alternatives, says Steve Carter, Nutanix’s product marketing director. “Many are reframing how to manage infrastructure, especially as demand for AI and cloud-native innovation escalates,” Carter said. A few years ago, Gregg Lowe the CIO of Boyd Gaming Corp., operator of 28 hotel and casino properties across the US, was negotiating a fresh enterprise agreement with VMware prior to its acquisition, reported The Register. “Boyd was using VMware as our hypervisor and Nutanix’s AHV,” said Lowe while interviewed at NEXT 2024. “I’ll call it a bake-off: May the best person win. We put our requirements out there and let things go head to head.” While Boyd opted for Nutanix, Lowe emphasized that Boyd Gaming couldn’t afford business disruptions. “We needed to plan out this migration,” he said. “It took about 18 months. It’s not something you just flip off a switch and you’re done. You need to plan. You need to focus to do the cutover. I do recognize some companies are probably easier than ours to go ahead and do the migration. But again, I still think it takes that commitment, that effort, and that reliance on each other to say, ‘this is what we’re doing.’” While Boyd Gaming switched from VMware to Nutanix, others choose to run two hypervisors for resilience against threats and scalability, Carter explained.“Organizations can maintain high-risk parts of their legacy VMware infrastructure while exploring how an alternative hypervisor can run business-critical applications and build new capabilities,” said Carter. When vendor shakeups occur, CIOs and IT leaders immediately think about resiliency. Vendor allegiance – once critical for many organizations due both to convenience and loyalty – has become a company liability for many. Additionally, the sheer amount of options available and today’s demand for more flexibility and hyper-customized user experiences require IT leaders to think more innovatively. Reveal the best of both worlds Carter noted that many VMware customers have invested in its solutions for decades but now seek modernization for greater agility, scalability, and cloud-native environments. The disruption from VMware’s acquisition has led many to reconsider their virtualization strategies and explore new options. “By running two hypervisors, companies can build a hybrid infrastructure that maintains legacy systems and learn what’s the best way to handle new demands,” Carter said. Carter explained that companies often run two hypervisors due to past mergers or acquisitions, where legacy systems exist across both environments rather than intentional implementation. However, this setup can offer a head start. He stressed that migrating to a new hypervisor requires careful planning and vendor support to ensure smooth execution and build IT team confidence. Notwithstanding, running two hypervisors can provide valuable resilience and help companies modernize while retaining legacy systems that still offer value and learning what works best. “The aim is to manage present needs and be able to enlist new capabilities to meet future demands,” Carter said. It’s the ongoing challenge of integrating legacy systems and applications with next-gen technologies and solutions. Which Carter said is particularly relevant as businesses embrace and evolve hybrid multicloud operations for a future where they can manage resources and workloads across on-premises and public cloud services. Rene Van Den Bedem, principal technical program manager at Microsoft Azure, noted the benefits clients are seeing by running VMware and Nutanix together on Azure public cloud. “The main requirement is having an Azure landing zone, and then you can build whatever service that you want on it,” he told The Forecast. “I think we’re going to see more of that. Typically, customers do like to have one hypervisor of choice, but that’s a legacy on-prem way of thinking. I think the world is changing.” Learn about AHV and the Nutanix Cloud Platform or explore the steps for migrating to Nutanix from VMware and the VMware to Nutanix Promotion. Disclaimer: Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan. source

The CIO’s job has never been simple, but modern IT challenges are becoming more and more complex and unwieldy by the day. Exponential data growth has confounded IT’s ability to affordably and securely manage it all. At the same time, employees, partners, customers, and other stakeholders need constant access to IT resources from many devices and locations, most of which are outside the firewall. And finally, the race to support and deploy generative AI can require expensive, difficult-to-source, and resource-intensive infrastructure. The problem is clear: Enterprise IT teams desperately need a solution to manage all these environments — data centers, edge, and public clouds — and gain the necessary agility to meet these mighty challenges. The answer…less so. Of course, a hybrid multicloud platform that brings the same operating approach and data services for apps wherever they are running can address this complexity, but only if implemented properly — otherwise, the result is cloud chaos. When evaluating and implementing a cloud platform, make sure to consider the following: Refactoring and replatforming: Refactoring and replatforming cost a ton of time and money. If the platform requires this step before migrating workloads to the cloud, the enterprise won’t see much return on investment. Nor will it achieve the necessary agility to keep up with the rapidly increasing pace of data creation and technology advancements. Complexity that creates new silos: When working with the public cloud, it’s all too easy to replicate the data silo problem that IT has battled for decades on-premises, especially if the organization is operating multiple cloud environments. Modern app development requires complex application dependency mapping and the constant integration of new tools. If the cloud environment is fragmented and siloed, software development and other IT development efforts can slow to a crawl. No dynamic scaling: Rather than consume resources at the same rate over time, plenty of workloads experience massive spikes. E-commerce apps and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) users, for example, will require more resources around the holidays to ensure a high-quality customer experience. Without the ability to dynamically scale workloads according to the current need, organizations are forced to pay for their maximum potential load year-round. That can add up to a lot of wasted money. The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides simplified enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure and management, so workloads can run anywhere. Built on top of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, the platform provides architectural and management consistency across clouds, edge, and on-premises environments. There’s no need to refactor applications, so migration is seamless and fast. Plus, IT can build, expand, or shrink the cloud footprint in just hours. Virtual machines, containers, data storage: All of it can be managed via a single platform, so administrators don’t need to be retrained. And since scaling can be automated, resources become available to workloads as needed. The end result? CIOs can optimize the cloud to its fullest, with the flexibility to run workloads wherever they’re needed — in data centers, at the edge, or in the public cloud of their choice — to meet the challenge of modern IT management. Learn more about the Nutanix Cloud Platform. source

When generative AI (genAI) burst onto the scene in November 2022 with the public release of OpenAI ChatGPT, it rapidly became the most hyped technology since the public internet. But what goes up must come down, and, according to Gartner, genAI has recently fallen into the “trough of disillusionment,” meaning that enterprises are not seeing the value and ROI they expected. The primary issue is that organizations don’t know where to get started with genAI because of the overwhelming opportunity. There are simply so many potential use cases that decision-makers struggle to identify the best choice to drive ROI and business value quickly. Further complicating matters, AI adoption and deployment often aren’t being driven by IT. Typically, when a new technology emerges, IT recognizes the value and then must convince the C-suite to invest. With AI, it’s exactly the opposite. Executives and boards of directors are charging IT with deploying genAI without a clear idea of the most appropriate use cases for their organizations. Before organizations set up dozens of proofs of concept (POCs) in the hope that something will stick, IT must spend time with relevant stakeholders — including the C-suite and individual business units — to flesh out a clear strategy. The process should grow from clear business goals into use cases that help advance these goals. From there, take a fail-fast approach, meaning that if the POC fails to create value in the short term, get out quickly and move to the next one. As soon as the organization starts seeing early success with a POC, scale it out and expand from there. Enterprises are, in fact, already seeing significant value when properly applying AI. Here are some excellent use cases for genAI: Hardening security: Security professionals must deal with so much data and so many alerts that important threat indicators can get lost in the noise. AI models can accurately and quickly detect financial fraud, identify anomalous network activity that could signal a threat, enrich and summarize alerts for IT admins, and automate policy creation. That means that admins can spend more time addressing and preventing threats and less time trying to interpret security data and alerts. Increasing productivity: When used in concert with human experts, genAI can accelerate the creation of content and code. Code copilots, intelligent document processing, and models fine-tuned on domain-specific data sets can create a first draft of whatever the employee needs, saving time and increasing productivity. Creating a superior customer experience: Organizations can supercharge the customer experience with genAI analysis of customer feedback, personalized chatbots, and tailored engagement. However, any customer-facing genAI apps need to be extensively and continuously tested and trained to ensure accuracy and a high-quality experience. Of course, good use cases are just the beginning. Organizations need to provide a proper infrastructure on which to run genAI. Taking a DIY approach to genAI infrastructure may feel right, but stitching together disparate systems from scratch is expensive and complex, requiring specialized expertise to architect it properly. That’s why Nutanix created GPT in a Box, a full-stack, turnkey AI solution that includes everything needed to build AI-ready infrastructure and start proving out use cases. Learn more about the Nutanix AI platform. source