Avaya provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services, specializing in unified communications (UCaaS) and AI-powered contact center (CCaaS) platforms that help businesses manage employee and customer experiences. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Avaya’s Head of Product Management— Apps, Sarita Fernandes, to learn more.
Sarita Fernandes’ Background
Could you share a bit about your background and what led you to your current role at Avaya? Fernandes said:
“I’ve spent nearly 25 years in the contact center and customer experience industries, focused on product strategy and helping enterprises adopt technology that delivers real business value. Much of my career has been spent working with large, complex organizations where scale, reliability, and trust are critical. That experience aligns closely with Avaya’s mission, and in my current role, I focus on solutions that help customers modernize their existing infrastructure while maintaining their mission-critical operations.”
Role At The Company
What are your primary responsibilities today, and how does the product portfolio fit into Avaya’s broader product and customer experience strategy? Fernandes shared:
“As the Vice President of Product Management, I’m responsible for the strategy and roadmap for Avaya’s customer experience (CX) portfolio. My role is to ensure our products directly address customer priorities while supporting Avaya’s broader vision of delivering connected, consistent experiences across voice and digital channels. Avaya Infinity plays a central role by bringing together communications, CX, analytics, and AI in a modular, open platform that gives customers flexibility and choice.”
Defining Moment
What has been one of the most meaningful or defining moments for you during your time at Avaya? Fernandes reflected:
“There have been several. We have had customers that have very specific use cases around retaining existing routing while also innovating using workflows. With our workflow power and hybrid deployment flexibility, customers can deliver personalized self-service experiences while retaining their existing complex routing rules.”
Product Portfolio
How would you describe Avaya’s product portfolio today, and which customer needs are you most focused on solving? Fernandes explained:
“Avaya is focused on serving enterprises — our sweet spot is large organizations and governments that need solutions they can count on. These customers have been clear about what matters most: going beyond traditional contact center use cases to deliver exceptional experiences, reliability, and mission-critical security and compliance. That’s why we offer Avaya Infinity platform, available on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid deployment model, so they can modernize at their own pace. Avaya Infinity is an open platform that lets them tap into a broad ecosystem of partner solutions — giving them the opportunity to orchestrate the experiences their customers expect.”
Challenges
What are some of the biggest challenges enterprises face around customer and employee experience, and how are Avaya’s products helping address them? Fernandes pointed out:
“Enterprises are facing rising customer expectations, an increasing number of engagement channels, and growing pressure on employees. Many are also constrained by disconnected systems that make it difficult to maintain context across interactions. We’re focused on giving enterprises the tools they need to stay ahead of customer expectations. That means investing in AI, automation, and cloud-native technologies, but also making sure those innovations are practical and easy to adopt. Again, the Avaya Infinity platform is a part of that, providing an open architecture so customers can integrate what they already have and tap into a broad ecosystem of partner solutions. The Avaya Infinity platform is open and also supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) to make AI smarter and more relevant by using context from across the customer journey. These capabilities, combined with advanced analytics and conversational AI, help enterprises orchestrate experiences that go beyond the traditional contact center turning it into a connection center and positioning them for the future of customer engagement.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Product Strategy
How has Avaya’s product strategy evolved in recent years, particularly around cloud, AI, and omnichannel engagement? Fernandes noted:
“Avaya is a fundamentally different company today. How we operate, how we build, and how we deliver products have changed. Our strategy has evolved to emphasize flexibility, intelligence, and customer choice. We’ve expanded our cloud and hybrid offerings, embedded AI across the platform, and strengthened omnichannel and journey orchestration capabilities. We’ve streamlined and rationalized our portfolio in a big way — going from over 100 products down to a focused set that delivers the most value to our customers. We’ve adopted an agile software development model so we can move faster and respond to evolving needs. We’ve also implemented a formal Voice-of-the-Customer Program to make sure their priorities shape our roadmap. These changes mean we’re building solutions that truly align with enterprise requirements and help them modernize with confidence.”
Milestones
Looking back, what milestones stand out as especially important in shaping Avaya’s product strategy? Fernandes cited:
“Key milestones include our shift to a more unified platform approach and the launch of the Avaya Infinity platform, which enables cross-channel orchestration and continuity. Advancements in agentic AI, analytics, and digital engagement have also been critical in helping customers adapt to evolving expectations while maintaining operational stability.”
Customer Success
Can you share examples of how customers are using Avaya’s products to improve customer and employee experiences? Fernandes highlighted:
“The Avaya Infinity platform allows self-serve to be tightly integrated with agent escalations — customer journey data is not fragmented and is unified. This enables customers to easily get a view of the complete, connected journey. Customers across industries such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector use Avaya’s solutions to unify channels, maintain context across interactions, and support agents with real-time insights. This includes improving routing and orchestration, identifying journey friction through analytics, and using AI assistants to help employees resolve issues more efficiently.”
Business Performance Trends
Are there any business performance trends or areas of growth you’re able to speak to at a high level? Fernandes pointed out:
“MCP is ultimately going to simplify integrations across the enterprise, not just the contact centers. This will enable brands to easily facilitate automation across the entire enterprise.”
Market Opportunity
How do you think about Avaya’s market opportunity as customer experience continues to evolve beyond the contact center? Fernandes described:
“Customer experience is expanding beyond the traditional contact center, into a connection center — to include every interaction across voice, digital, self-service, and assisted channels. Avaya’s opportunity lies in helping enterprises connect those interactions and maintain continuity across the entire customer journey. As CX becomes more distributed across the business, orchestration and integration become increasingly critical.”
Differentiation
From a product perspective, what differentiates Avaya’s products in a crowded CX and enterprise communications market? Fernandes affirmed:
“Avaya differentiates itself through flexibility, scale, and a strong focus on continuity. Our products support multiple deployment models, integrate communications and CX capabilities, and allow customers to modernize within their existing infrastructure. This approach is especially important for large enterprises with complex, mission-critical environments that need to modernize while maintaining stability.”
Priorities
Looking ahead, what priorities will shape Avaya’s product roadmap and next phase of innovation? Fernandes emphasized:
“Our roadmap is focused on making AI more practical and actionable, expanding omnichannel and journey-orchestration capabilities, and helping customers turn data into meaningful insights. We’re also prioritizing tools that improve employee experiences, recognizing their critical role in delivering better customer outcomes.”
Advice For Building Customer Experience Products
What should enterprise leaders be thinking about right now when it comes to building scalable, future-ready customer experience products? Fernandes concluded:
“Over the next three to five years, the greatest advances in customer experience will come from systems that understand context. MCP lays the groundwork for that evolution, turning AI into an active participant in the enterprise. As MCP adoption grows, enterprises will move beyond isolated bots to AI assistants that draw on rich context, including customer history, sentiment and business logic to deliver proactive, personalized service at scale.”
