Ed. Note: Avaya has long been a leading supplier of contact center solutions with a large customer base and a history going back to when it was a part of AT&T 25-plus years ago. Here are the perspectives of its users who belong to the International Avaya User Group (IAUG).
Every year, the International Avaya User Group (IAUG) offers one of the clearest windows into how enterprise customers view the Avaya ecosystem.
In 2025, this perspective was, and is, more valuable than ever. Avaya is in the midst of repositioning its business toward a more cloud-forward strategy, while simultaneously serving one of the most entrenched and loyal customer bases in enterprise technology.
The 2025 IAUG State of the Market Survey, conducted in collaboration with Swampfox Technologies, captured the views of 434 Avaya enterprise contact center leaders and practitioners across a wide range of industries including utilities, healthcare, financial services, education, and government.
Nearly nine in 10 respondents are current Avaya Aura Elite Contact Center customers, meaning the results strongly reflect the voice of Avaya’s core enterprise base.
With 18 questions spanning cloud migration, AI adoption, customer experience (CX) priorities, and Avaya brand sentiment, the survey reveals both a stable foundation and growing tension.
Customers remain committed to their Avaya platforms but are no longer content with stability alone. They demand modernization, flexibility, and a roadmap that balances innovation with cost predictability and risk management.
This article examines the survey’s major findings, the themes they reveal, and what they mean for both Avaya and its customers. The message is clear: Avaya is entrenched, but modernization is now expected.
Avaya’s Conditional Loyalty
The first conclusion from the survey is unmistakable: Avaya remains the backbone of its enterprise contact center customers.
For many enterprises, Avaya still represents unmatched uptime, scale, and compliance readiness. In industries where regulatory requirements are strict and downtime is unacceptable, Avaya’s reputation as the “safe bet” continues to resonate.
Yet this loyalty is conditional.
Enterprises want to leverage cloud capabilities...while protecting their mission-critical Avaya investments.
While respondents described Avaya as a “trusted partner” and the “gold standard of contact center tools,” they also made clear that reliability alone is not enough. Customers expect visible modernization in areas like AI, advanced speech technologies, and hybrid flexibility.
This sentiment reflects a broader truth: in the contact center market, heritage is no longer a differentiator.
Avaya’s history of technical depth and reliability provides credibility, but it must be translated into leadership for the next era of CX. Enterprises want proof that Avaya can evolve as fast as customer expectations and competitive pressures demand.
For Avaya customers, the message is equally clear. They can continue to trust Avaya as a viable long-term platform, but only if they proactively demand modernization and integrate innovation layers into their current environments. Legacy strength alone will not sustain competitive advantage.
The Cloud Dilemma: Interest High, Hybrid Preferred
Cloud migration remains one of the most complex and pressing topics for Avaya customers. The survey reveals both high interest and deep caution.
- 42% of respondents are evaluating competitive contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers such as Genesys, Five9, and NiCE/inContact.
- 30%–32% are considering Avaya Infinity options for either private or public cloud.
- 29.5% are exploring hybrid models.
- Only 11% reported a hard on-premise stance with no interest in cloud.
This distribution reveals a pragmatic reality: cloud benefits are attractive, but wholesale migrations remain too risky for most enterprises.
The clear trend is toward staged, hybrid adoption. Enterprises want to leverage cloud capabilities, particularly for AI, analytics, and digital channels, while protecting their mission-critical Avaya investments.
In other words, cloud is less about “rip-and-replace” and more about selective modernization.
This finding also underscores why the phrase “Innovate in Place”, resonates so strongly with Avaya customers.
This method, developed by Swampfox, transmutes their older, legacy technologies into integrated building blocks and synchronously platformed to create more scalable, adaptable, and powerful business solutions.
This ability to extend existing investments, integrate cloud services incrementally, and preserve operational continuity is far more appealing than a disruptive migration.
The Cloud Shift and Avaya Customer Loyalty
One of the long-reported benefits of shifting software like contact center routing, IVR, and outbound dialing from on-premise installations to the cloud is the greater flexibility to add, change, and update applications.
But does that also mean that contact centers can more easily change suppliers than in the past?
For Avaya, with its install base including many rugged, reliable, but aging legacy on-premise applications, does that mean its customer base is becoming less “sticky”?
If customers can now migrate without the disruption and cost of a full rip-and-replace, doesn’t that make it easier for them to leave Avaya? Thereby putting the company on notice that it does need to modernize to keep its users?
Here are the responses to these questions, posed by Contact Center Pipeline Editor Brendan Read, from Tom Hanson, Swampfox Technologies who authored the article “Avaya at a Crossroads” that drew on the results of the 2025 International Avaya Users Group (IAUG) survey.
“The notion that cloud migration automatically reduces customer stickiness oversimplifies the reality of enterprise contact center operations,” says Tom.
“While the cloud may remove certain infrastructure constraints, the operational and integration dependencies that define an enterprise contact center remain just as complex, and just as sticky.
“Avaya customers have decades of operational logic, data integrations, and performance expectations built into their systems.
“Moving those workflows to any new platform, even within Avaya’s own cloud environment, requires redevelopment, reintegration, retraining, and re-validation of reporting and business rules. That’s disruptive and costly, regardless of where the software runs.
“What’s more, many cloud platforms replace one form of lock-in with another. Once you adopt a provider’s proprietary ecosystem, you’re tied to their roadmap, pricing, uptime, and integration limits. You gain elasticity, but you lose independence.
“That’s why there is a strategy to ‘Innovate in Place,’ transforming existing legacy technologies, precisely to counter this trap. This methodology enables Avaya customers to modernize, extend capabilities, and even integrate cloud-based technologies: without abandoning the proven core of their operations.
“This approach preserves the customer’s investment, minimizes disruption, and lets them innovate at their own pace while maintaining technology independence.
“In short, moving to the cloud doesn’t eliminate stickiness: it just shifts where it resides. Avaya customers can now evolve on their own terms rather than being forced into another vendor’s box.”
AI and Speech: From Optional to Essential
If there is one area where the survey results leave no room for ambiguity, it is AI and advanced speech. These capabilities are no longer “future projects” but are immediate priorities.
- Generative AI conversations (43.6%) and intelligent virtual assistants (43.6%) topped the list of advanced speech applications enterprises want to implement.
- Natural language understanding (NLU), at 35.9%, also scored highly, signaling intent recognition and conversational AI are now mainstream expectations.
- More than 40% already use third-party NLU tools like Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, or Microsoft Azure.
Perhaps most telling: AI topics were among the top priorities respondents identified for IAUG Converge 2025, the community’s flagship event. This signals that AI integration is now seen as baseline for modern CX strategies.
The implication is urgent. Enterprises cannot afford to delay AI adoption until after cloud migration.
Instead, the smarter move is to integrate AI within existing Avaya environments now, using solutions to deliver transcription, NLU, and text-to-speech. By doing so, organizations gain immediate efficiency and CX improvements, without waiting years for a full platform shift.
But for Avaya, this finding is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it validates that AI demand is real and immediate. On the other hand, it highlights the competitive risk: if Avaya cannot deliver AI capabilities quickly enough, customers will source them from third-party vendors, weakening Avaya’s centrality.
Decision Drivers: Cost, Compliance, and Integration
When it comes to technology decisions, the survey shows that Avaya customers are guided less by hype and more by pragmatism, as noted earlier.
For those committed to staying on-premise:
- Integration with existing systems (45.5%) is the top driver.
- Security and data privacy (40.9%) are equally critical.
- Cost of change (40.9%) underscores the financial risk of large migrations.
For those evaluating cloud:
- Scalability (37.2%) and business continuity (30.8%) are the most important motivators.
- Compliance, cost savings, and agility also appear frequently, but always weighed against risk.
Across both groups, three priorities stand out: integration, compliance, and predictable cost models. Enterprises are looking for modernization that fits seamlessly with existing workflows, aligns with regulatory requirements (HIPAA, PCI, CJIS [Criminal Justice Information Services]), and avoids unpredictable consumption-based expenses.
The message: enterprises will modernize, but only when the business case is clear, the risk is controlled, and the cost model is predictable. Vendor hype or industry trends alone are not persuasive.
Avaya’s Brand Health: Trusted, But Under Pressure
Question 12 of the survey asked respondents an open-ended question: “What is your organization’s perspective of Avaya?” The responses provide a nuanced picture of Avaya’s brand health.
- 45% expressed positive sentiment, describing Avaya as a “trusted partner” and “gold standard of contact center tools.”
- 35% were neutral, often acknowledging Avaya’s history and technical depth without highlighting innovation.
- 20% were critical, citing lost loyalty, slow innovation, and rising competitive threats.
The takeaway: Avaya still carries significant goodwill, but loyalty is not unconditional. Customers want Avaya to succeed, but patience is finite. Competitors are actively winning attention, and if Avaya fails to deliver modernization, customers are prepared to explore alternatives.
For Avaya, the brand remains stable, but vulnerable. Stability is a valuable asset, especially in regulated industries. But without proof of leadership in AI, automation, and hybrid strategies, stability risks being overshadowed by perceptions of stagnation.
Industry Voices: Utilities, Healthcare, Financial Services
One of the most valuable aspects of the IAUG survey is its industry diversity. Respondents represent a wide spectrum of verticals.
- Several industries emerge as especially prominent: education (17.9%), government (15.4%), technology/telecom (14.1%), and financial services (11.5%).
- Utilities and healthcare also show strong representation.
Each sector brings unique modernization pressures. Here are some examples.
- Utilities: Focused on outage management, storm handling, callbacks, and fraud prevention. Predictable cost models and compliance drive their cautious approach to cloud.
- Healthcare: Prioritize HIPAA compliance, EPIC/EMR integration, and multilingual support. Incremental modernization is critical to avoid disruption to patient services.
- Financial Services: Strong emphasis on security, fraud prevention, and personalized service. AI-enabled authentication and voice biometrics are particularly appealing.
- Government and Education: Often constrained by budgets and compliance frameworks, these sectors require modernization paths that align with public accountability and long procurement cycles.
Across all industries, the theme is consistent: modernization is necessary but disruption is unacceptable. This explains the strong interest in hybrid strategies and AI adoption within existing Avaya environments.
What This Means for Avaya, Customers
Taken together, the survey paints a picture of an enterprise community that is committed, pragmatic, and impatient.
For Avaya customers:
- They remain invested in Avaya but they must demand visible modernization.
- AI, speech, and omnichannel innovations should be integrated now, not delayed until cloud migration.
- Cloud adoption should be staged and hybrid, aligning benefits with immediate business needs while protecting mission-critical investments.
- Loyalty should be hedged with optionality; customers should prepare contingencies to avoid vendor lock-in.
For Avaya:
- The company must accelerate delivery of AI, speech, and hybrid capabilities or risk losing customers to competitors.
- Stability is valuable but insufficient. Innovation is non-negotiable.
- Avaya’s path forward depends on proving it can evolve quickly enough to meet customer expectations, not just as a safe option, but as a leader.
Key Takeaways and Recommendations
The 2025 IAUG Member Survey confirms that Avaya is at a crossroads. Its base remains strong, but as this article has outlined, demands for modernization are clear and urgent.
Key Takeaways:
- Avaya remains core, but competitive threats loom. Many of the respondent customers are exploring competitors.
- Hybrid is the practical reality. Cloud adoption is attractive, but staged, hybrid strategies dominate.
- AI and advanced speech are no longer optional. Enterprises expect these capabilities now.
- Decisions hinge on compliance, integration, and predictable cost models. Risk and cost control outweigh hype.
- Avaya’s brand is stable but vulnerable. Customers trust Avaya, but patience is finite.
Recommendations for Enterprises:
- Modernize without disruption. Add AI, automation, and speech capabilities to Avaya today.
- Adopt hybrid selectively. Move workloads to the cloud where it adds immediate value.
- Control your destiny. Avoid lock-in by integrating flexible, vendor-neutral solutions.
- Hedge loyalty. Trust Avaya for stability but prepare contingency strategies.
Recommendations for Avaya:
- Deliver AI and hybrid capabilities faster.
- Preserve stability while proving innovation.
- Reframe brand perception from legacy to leader.
Conclusion
The 2025 IAUG Member Survey provides a candid snapshot of where Avaya stands in the enterprise contact center market. Customers still trust Avaya, but they expect more. They want AI now, hybrid flexibility soon, and a clear path forward that balances innovation with cost and compliance.
Avaya’s path forward depends on proving it can evolve quickly enough...
Avaya’s future will not be defined by its past. The company’s ability to retain and grow its enterprise base depends on proving it can innovate as reliably as it has historically delivered uptime and scale.
For Avaya customers, the opportunity is to modernize on their own terms, without disruption, without unnecessary risk, and with full control over their technology destiny.
The next chapter of Avaya’s story depends on how quickly and credibly it delivers modernization.