Avaya

In 1995, Lucent Technologies was spun off from AT&T, and Lucent spun off units of its own in an attempt to restructure its struggling operations.^[7]

Avaya was then spun off from Lucent as its own company in 2000 (Lucent would merge with Alcatel SA in 2006, becoming Alcatel-Lucent, in turn being purchased by Nokia in 2016). It remained a public company from 2000 to 2007, when it was purchased by private equity firms.

In 2001, Avaya Interaction Center - software for customer relationship management - was released, enabling businesses to draw multi-platform call centers to multimedia, multi-site contact centers. A proposed "converged communications" road map focused on the role that applications would play in making communications improve business performance.

On December 15, 2017, it once again became a public company, trading under the stock ticker AVYA.[1]

In August 2020, Avaya announced Simon Vatcher 's appointment as Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand as the company seeks to drive long-term digital strategies and accelerate operational recovery for regional organizations and businesses.[8]

In October 2007, Avaya was acquired by two private-equity firms, TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners, for $8.2 billion[9][10] and the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.[11] The following year, Avaya Speech to Text (enabling voicemail messages to be read on mobile devices or computers) and Avaya Unified Communications (focusing on role-based communications for teleworkers, home agents, small-business mobile workers, branch-office integration, retail stores and branch banking) were introduced, and Kevin Kennedy became the company's CEO and president.[12]

In 2009, the Avaya Aura for integrated communications was introduced, and in December the company acquired Nortel's Enterprise assets for $900 million.[13] The following year, Avaya was the converged-network equipment supplier for the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, and Avaya Aura Contact Center was introduced. In June 2011, Avaya filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $1 billion in an initial public offering.[14] On October 4, 2011, the company reported that it was acquiring Sipera Systems for its session border controller (SBC) and unified communications security applications.[15][16] On October 19, 2011, it was reported that Avaya would buy Aurix.[17] Shareholders approved the acquisition of Radvision for about $230 million on April 30, 2012,[18][19] and the deal closed in June.[20]

According to May 2016 news articles[21] citing "internal sources", Avaya's private-equity owners (Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital) considered a sale of the company valued at $6 to $10 billion including debt.[22] During the company's earnings call that month, CEO Kevin Kennedy had confirmed that Goldman Sachs was helping Avaya evaluate expressions of interest received relative to specific assets and explore other potential opportunities.[23] In November, Avaya considered Chapter 11 bankruptcy while trying to sell its call-center business.[24] On January 19, 2017 Avaya filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, saying that its foreign operations would be unaffected.[25][26] In its petition, the company listed $5.5 billion in assets and $6.3 billion in debts.[27]

In an effort to monetize its assets during the bankruptcy period, Avaya announced in March 2017 it had received a stalking horse offer for its networking business and associated products from Extreme Networks for US$100 million.[28] There were no other bids and the sale was finalized in July 2017.[29]

In October 2019, Avaya entered into a strategic partnership with RingCentral and together, will introduce a new unified communications as a service solution (UCaaS) called Avaya Cloud Office ( “ACO”). RingCentral has agreed to contribute $500 million and will be the exclusive provider of the new Avaya UCaaS offer.[30]