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Avaya finds louder voice for mission-critical comms platform

Enterprise software provider unveils mission-critical platform to deliver secure, zero-downtime voice communications for environments including government, healthcare, financial and emergency services

Aiming to tap into current dynamics where voice communications are regaining their importance, and with businesses reaffirming preferences for on-premise and hybrid strategies, Avaya has announced a mission-critical voice platform, Nexus, designed specifically for highly regulated environments such as public safety, healthcare, financial services and defence.

The latter are, said the enterprise comms software provider, sectors where communications failure can disrupt emergency response, financial operations or government services – in short, use case where reliability is becoming a defining factor in enterprise technology strategy.

According to research from Frost & Sullivan, nearly two‑thirds of enterprises continue to struggle with reliability, security and compliance concerns. As a result, half of all IT and telecom decision‑makers now rank these factors among their top criteria when selecting communications and collaboration providers. Survey data further showed that 83% of enterprises expect to retain some portion of their communications infrastructure on‑premise through 2028, driven largely by stringent security, reliability and compliance requirements.

The launch of Avaya Nexus is said to come as enterprises reassess how comms infrastructure supports artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workflows and crisis coordination, and the platform is said to focus on always-on resiliency, hardened security and integration with existing operational systems.

The platform is claimed to be built for always-on reliability, high-fidelity voice clarity and hardened security for organisations in mission-critical environments where voice communications downtime is not an option. Moreover, the company said it goes beyond what general-purpose collaboration platforms are designed to deliver, with a secure voice infrastructure and broader ecosystem integration through a cloud-native architecture and deployment flexibility.

“With the current macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges, organisations are prioritising data control and sovereignty,” said Elka Popova, connected work vice-president and senior fellow at Frost & Sullivan.

“The unified communications (UC) market is also becoming mature and more commoditised. In this environment, organisations are prioritising security, reliability and compliance to ensure consistent performance of their mission-critical communications infrastructure. Avaya is leveraging its proven enterprise voice heritage to deliver a zero‑downtime platform for regulated industries, aligning directly with the heightened need for trusted, resilient infrastructure.”

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Avaya also believes that with the launch it is differentiating itself by addressing the specialised mission-critical infrastructure needs of regulated industries including healthcare, emergency services (public safety dispatch), financial services, public utilities, and government and defence. It sees Nexus as serving as a sovereign foundation for organisations that require “secure”, “dedicated” and “isolated” capabilities from a highly resilient service.

Another key point was to bridge the gap between on-premise reliability and AI modernisation, and to use its heritage in voice along with modern, open architectural principles to ensure agile, resilient and scalable offerings, and deliver an integration-ready open architecture. This approach, it assured, allows for flexible deployment in both cloud and on-premise environments.

Avaya Nexus uses application programming interfaces to connect voice with notification systems, radios and paging workflows, so organisations can modernise without sacrificing the operational control their critical voice communications environments require. It serves as the foundation for integrating advanced services such as AI for real-time keyword and action detection, voice authentication and analysis, instant transcription and translation, and bringing new value to mission-critical workflows.

“For the world’s most critical sectors, a dropped call isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s a crisis,” said Tony Lama, senior vice-president and general manager of Avaya Software. “Avaya Nexus isn’t a forced migration; it’s an evolution. We’re giving enterprises the high reliability that they have trusted for decades, now optimised for a cloud-native, AI-driven future.”

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