Red Education training partner
Avaya
Enterprise communications: Aura, IP Office, and contact center.
Avaya builds enterprise communications and contact-center platforms - the Aura suite, IP Office, and the Experience Platform - carrying decades of voice-engineering heritage into unified communications and CX.
Red Education runs one of the deepest Avaya schedules in its catalogue: Aura core components, System Manager and Communication Manager administration, IP Office integration and support, Meetings Server, Messaging, Experience Portal, and Call Center Elite courses run across all five of its regions, with public dates virtually every week.
Avaya was spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2000, inheriting the enterprise half of a lineage that reaches back through AT&T to Bell Labs. It restructured through Chapter 11 twice, in 2017 and again briefly in 2023, and today concentrates on large-enterprise communications and contact center, increasingly delivered as cloud and hybrid services.
Founding stories
Avaya
Avaya was born carrying a century of telephone heritage. When Lucent - itself the 1996 spinoff of AT&T's systems and Bell Labs lineage - shed its enterprise communications business in October 2000, the PBXs, call centers, and messaging systems that descended from Western Electric became a standalone company. Avaya inherited the installed base of corporate telephony at the exact moment voice was turning into software, and its whole subsequent story - private equity, the Nortel auction, two bankruptcies, the cloud pivot - is the drama of carrying that inheritance across the IP transition.
The timeline
- Spun off from Lucent
The enterprise communications business of Lucent Technologies lists as Avaya - Bell System DNA, now selling PBXs and contact centers under its own flag as VoIP arrives in earnest.
- Private equity takes over
TPG and Silver Lake take Avaya private for roughly $8.2 billion - the leveraged chapter whose debt load shapes the following fifteen years.
- The Nortel auction
Avaya wins Nortel's Enterprise Solutions business for about $900 million at the bankruptcy auction - absorbing its great rival's enterprise voice base and, with it, the data-networking line that traces to Bay Networks (that story continues on this section's Nortel/Bay page).
- Chapter 11, and networking to Extreme
Avaya files Chapter 11 in January to restructure the buyout debt; as part of the reshaping, the networking business - the old Nortel/Bay lineage - goes to Extreme Networks, whose career page tells the buyer's side. Avaya relists on the NYSE in 2018 as a software and services company.
- The second restructuring
A pre-packaged Chapter 11 in February 2023 cuts the debt again; Avaya emerges within months, privately held and refocused on Avaya Experience Platform - the contact center as its center of gravity.
Emergence timing per 2023 press coverage.
Flagship products and solutions
- Avaya Experience PlatformThe contact center as a service line - the modern descendant of decades of call-center engineering.
- Avaya AuraThe enterprise UC and call-control platform carrying the PBX lineage into IP.
- Communication Manager heritageThe Definity/Communication Manager line - Western Electric to Lucent to Avaya, one unbroken telephony bloodline.
Key innovations
- Enterprise voice at Bell scaleAvaya inherited and operated the largest installed base in corporate telephony - the reference implementation of how big organizations talk.
- The consolidation crossroadsThe 2009 Nortel purchase made Avaya the meeting point of the two great enterprise-voice lineages - and its networking divestiture to Extreme in 2017 seeded another vendor taught on this site.
Main markets
Avaya today is a privately held contact-center and UC vendor serving a vast installed base, competing with cloud-native CCaaS players while monetizing the deepest legacy estate in enterprise voice.
Analyst standing
- A fixture of the UC and contact-center evaluations for two decades - the incumbent every challenger measured against, through every ownership chapter.
Red Education recognition
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Best Cybersecurity Education Provider
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Best Cybersecurity Certification Training
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Cybersecurity Instructor Team of the Year
- 100,000+ students trained across 132 countries; 4.9-star average from 5,000+ reviews