Avaya case study: Growing a digital ecosystem with EMaaS

Problem

Avaya’s challenges

The DevConnect team wasn’t just worried about maintaining the scope and services of their existing program. They also wanted to supplement it with a series of new initiatives.

While they were delivering something in every area that matters to a successful developer experience, a gap analysis revealed they were falling short in terms of depth, usability and completeness.

• The program was labor intensive and manual with no workflow engine.
• The aesthetics were unpolished; there were pages and pages of links that had been handcrafted but weren’t easy to maintain.
• There was a lot of re-coding required to change existing records and database structures.

Overall, the infrastructure was just so limiting, the team couldn’t scale their program without a huge amount of manual effort.

That’s when Avaya decided to scrap it’s DIY approach and implement Ecosystem Management-as-a-Service with Constellant.

Solution

How EMaaS helped

Jon’s team at Avaya were initially drawn to the Ecosystem Management-as-a-Service infrastructure because they knew they’d no longer have any gaps in functionality. That meant the team running DevConnect could now focus on automating workflows in key areas like the ticketing process.

But the challenge was hardly a small one. A few months later, the team re-launched DevConnect. To get there, we migrated 70,000 users and 21,000 companies to a system that included:

• Content management
• Administrative workflows that followed best practices
• Advanced search functionality for users to find what they need
• Tracking functionality and reporting components
• Responsive design elements
• Modern forum boards
• Automated workflows
• Enhanced support with notifications
• Tools to improve online documentation
• Single sign-on with other Avaya web properties

Since then, Avaya has even decided to migrate the DevConnect marketplace over to the same system, transforming it to deliver a mobile-first experience.

Jon Alperin:

Constellant is more than a supplier. They are a partner, so treat them as such. Don’t just ask them to deliver, ask them to help solve – these are very smart people. They can solve lots of challenges.

– Jon Alperin, Global Managing Director of Developer Relations (DevConnect), Avaya

Results

The impact of DevConnect

The new DevConnect program has helped the team dramatically improve their online documentation, drive awareness of new products, improve support ticketing and help product teams reach the DevConnect community.

The metrics speak for themselves:

• The number of developers has increased 42% (from 70,000 to 100,000)
• The number of partner companies has grown by 38% (from 21,000 to 29,000)
• Web traffic has been increasing the whole time

More broadly, the program is still growing the revenue potential of the whole company and enabling them to introduce new product portfolios as they expand their audience to include cloud, mobile and WebRTC-oriented developers.

Crucially, Jon’s team can expand the scope of the underlying framework any time they want, knowing they can scale their efforts to match the community.

This is how it’s done.

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