I’ve been fairly negative on Avaya for a while, largely driven by repeated restructures, and a sense that they were reacting to the market rather than shaping it. For the past few years we’ve seen rapid UCaaS adoption across multiple markets segments and while Avaya’s competitors pushed aggressively into UCaaS, CCaaS and now AI-led platforms, Avaya often felt caught between protecting its legacy base and trying to redefine its future.  

The latest announcement around Nexus feels different, more around the clarity of positioning Avaya in the market. Rather than competing in an increasingly commoditised UCaaS market, Avaya is leaning further into mission-critical environments, regulated verticals and sovereign controlled infrastructure which align with its heritage and strengths. 

The timing also makes sense. We’re seeing a clear shift from the industry towards verticalization as well as increasing demand for data sovereignty with AI accelerating these trends. In that context, Avaya’s positioning around reliability and hybrid flexibility remains credible especially around the verticals that it is focusing on. 

Overall, though, this is probably the most coherent direction we’ve seen from Avaya in some time shifting the conversation to control and resilience in a few core sectors rather than what felt like platform and product consolidation. As evidenced by the statement in their press from Randy Freeman, Interior Communications Director, U.S. Navy Shipboard, there are a number of very large customers who still have a set of requirements that cloud providers may struggle to deliver to: 

“The success of U.S. Warfighters on the battlefield depends on resilient, secure, and effective mission-critical communications to support vital and lethal operations while deployed and in warfighting environments,”  

The big questions now are around execution, the depth of their AI capabilities, and whether they can build the ecosystem needed to support these vertical plays. There’s also a tension around sovereignty when still relying on hyperscalers like Azure and Google Cloud but deploying in secure, dedicated or isolated environment may solve this. 

As always, execution will decide everything. With availability targeted for late 2026, this is less about immediate delivery and more about signalling a clearer long-term direction, something Avaya has arguably lacked in recent years. It will be particularly interesting to see which partners can genuinely deliver in these environments, and whether this drives further consolidation around a smaller number of partners with the scale and vertical expertise to succeed.