5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Avaya System

Last updated on February 13, 2026

Avaya has long been a default choice for enterprise telephony and contact centers. However, most customers didn’t actually “pick” the system recently — they inherited it, expanded on it, and built processes around it as their teams grew. A 2025 survey of 434 Avaya contact center leaders revealed that nearly 90% operate on Avaya Aura Elite environments. Although an active, supported product today, it’s widely viewed as a legacy contact center solution.

The issue isn’t that the software doesn’t work. It’s that as sales and support demands evolve, the gap between what the majority of Avaya products were built for and what businesses need today creates more and more friction.

Have you wondered if your contact center software is the reason your progress has stagnated lately? Here are five telltale signs your organization has outgrown its Avaya system.

Sign #1: Scaling Always Takes Too Long

In a modern cloud communications platform, increasing agent capacity or adding new campaigns takes a few minutes. In many Avaya environments, they’re lengthy technical projects that require hardware procurement, license allocation, system configuration, and often vendor support for anything beyond basic setups. Even with virtualized Avaya environments, scaling typically involves capacity planning, license procurement cycles, and implementation windows that can take weeks.

This process leads to competitive liabilities when you need to:

Launch opportunistic campaigns: Without maintaining unused staff year-round, you can’t capitalize on unexpected opportunities.
Expand into a new market: Opening a sales office in Germany means coordinating equipment shipment, scheduling on-site installation, and configuring network connectivity weeks before your lease start date.
Support distributed teams: Avaya requires remote agent licensing, VPN configuration, network capacity assessments, and often hardware delivered to home offices.
Handle seasonal fluctuations: To prepare for the winter holiday season, you have to plan capacity in August, procure licenses in September, and schedule implementation windows in October —just to add agents you’ll scale back down in January.
Expand support hours: Extending from 12 hours to 24/7 coverage with a night shift across multiple time zones requires capacity assessment for concurrent users, potential infrastructure upgrades for the expanded load, and coordination across regional deployments.

This all comes from Avaya’s conception in a more static contact center world, where infrastructure changed sporadically, predictability mattered more than speed, and agents were added in planned phases.

The problem is, most businesses, like yours, don’t operate that way anymore.

Sign #2: Your Costs Rise Without Clarity

One of the most common price-related frustrations Avaya customers have isn’t that the system is too expensive—it’s that they can’t easily explain why, where the money actually goes, and how to predict the next invoice.

This isn’t surprising, considering Avaya’s largely legacy portfolio. According to a 2024 IDC report, enterprises maintaining legacy systems spend up to 42% more on operational overhead compared to those that have moved to cloud platforms.

Avaya’s commercial model is typically built around:

Per-License or Per-Agent Subscription
Add-On Fees for Advanced Functionality
Separate Pricing for Analytics, Integrations, or Channels
Additional Charges Tied to Regions, Numbers, or Support Tiers

Beyond licensing, the infrastructure itself often adds multiple cost layers: hardware maintenance contracts, software assurance agreements, license compliance audits, third-party support contracts, and, in many cases, overlapping vendor relationships created through acquisitions or system expansions over time. This often makes the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) unclear.

As many companies have used the system for years, they may be paying for capacity that was provisioned long ago but is no longer fully utilized, or maintaining branch hardware for users who now work remotely. As the business grows, it becomes harder to answer basic financial questions:

What’s driving monthly increases
Which features are essential vs. optional
How costs will scale next quarter or next year

When pricing layers accumulate over time, the issue is rarely a single line item — it’s a lack of structural cost transparency.

Sign #3: Support Eligibility Keeps Changing

Avaya’s corporate restructuring and evolving product roadmap have led to repeated shifts in End of Life (EoL) and End of Support (EoS) statuses. In June 2025, the company discontinued support for Avaya Experience Platform (AXP) subscription bundles for organizations with fewer than 200 seats.

For customers below that threshold, the implications are concrete:

Loss of Direct, First-Party Support
Reduced Access to Future Upgrades
Uncertainty around Long-Term Roadmap Continuity
Pressure to Migrate or Shift Deployment Models

While this decision aligned with Avaya’s broader strategic focus on large enterprises, its impact on the rest of the client base is uneven.

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) may now depend on partners for configuration changes or problem-solving, increasing resolution time and adding layers of coordination that smaller teams are not always able to manage.

Growing sales organizations — already operating within tightly managed mid-growth cycles and hiring forecasts — may find their plans directly affected by support eligibility changes. Decisions about headcount expansion, territory launches, and campaign scaling are now based on vendor thresholds rather than business demand.

Smaller outbound operations may find themselves paying for enterprise-level functionality while still lacking the agility and dialing optimization they depend on.

If your team falls into any of these categories, vendor policy is no longer a background consideration — it becomes a factor in how and when you scale.

Sign#4: Simple Tasks Need Workarounds

Want to connect your contact center software with a CRM, sync real-time data with a Workforce Management system, or unify channel dashboards? Avaya can support these use cases, but it often requires middleware, custom development, third-party integration platforms, or professional services.

This is common for platforms that have evolved over decades. As new capabilities are added, they’re often layered onto existing architecture rather than built into a unified foundation. In Avaya’s ecosystem, only the AXP was designed API‑first, while Aura/Elite and older typically rely on add-on servers and SDK-based integrations.

So, the workaround treadmill begins:

Want Click-to-call? Use CTI middleware.
Need another communication channel? Integrate a third-party gateway.
Require call sentiment analysis? Export recordings to an external AI platform.
Depend on a Mobile app? Accept limited native functionality or purchase a third-party solution.

Over time, the stack grows heavier and heavier.

Sign #5: Built-In Reporting Isn't Always Sufficient

Within Avaya’s product lineup, reporting capabilities vary greatly. Modern cloud systems like AXP offer real-time reports in Workspaces alongside historical dashboards for interactions and performance metrics. Aura/Elite environments depend heavily on the separate CMS server (Avaya Call Management System), often supplemented by additional tools. Avaya Analytics for Oceana consolidates interaction and routing data across channels such as voice, web, email, SMS, and social media into historical dashboards and filtered reports. IP Office uses Avaya Call Reporting, primarily focusing on call history and activity.

For many organizations not using AXP, this results in third-party dependence or compromises:

Strong visibility into voice activity, but limited cross-channel comparison
Detailed historical reporting, but limited real-time operational adjustments
Clear interaction metrics, but no unified performance overview

Avaya recognizes these limitations, so in 2024, the company encouraged many large enterprises to “innovate in place”—maintaining their stable, on-premises Aura voice core while layering on cloud capabilities like AI, digital channels, and advanced analytics via AXP. Although this approach addresses the immediate need for new features, it often creates a management headache: juggling two different security frameworks and disconnected data streams.

Upgrading to a new product doesn’t easily resolve these issues either. Transitioning from Aura to AXP-level reporting, for example, is not just a software update but a platform migration, involving significant costs, complexity, and process disruptions.

We know how important operational alignment is. Let’s restore yours.

Final Words

The question here shouldn’t be “Is Avaya bad?”, but rather “Is it right for where we are now and where we’re going?” The system might still technically work, but the real costs of continuing with a software you’ve outgrown show up in campaigns you can’t launch, markets you enter slowly, insights you don’t have, and competitors who reach your ideal clients before you can.

For companies in various industries, that realization leads to an architecture pivot. More and more teams are looking into cloud-native contact center platforms like Squaretalk, designed for painless scalability and market expansion, zero hardware dependencies, and a single, unified interface.

Ready for a system that is an asset instead of a constraint? Contact our team today.

FAQ

How do I know if we’ve outgrown Avaya?

This rarely happens all at once. It becomes visible when growth initiatives consistently require structural workarounds — new projects for scaling, additional layers for integrations, policy-driven decisions for support, or reporting changes that demand architectural shifts.

If maintaining alignment requires more and more effort, it may be time to evaluate whether your current environment still fits how your organization operates today.

Our Avaya system works fine for our current needs. Why change?

Now is precisely the moment to evaluate alternatives, before you’re in crisis mode. If you wait until scaling limitations are blocking major initiatives, support issues are causing operational problems, or reporting gaps are costing you visibility in a competitive situation, you’ll be transitioning reactively with little time to evaluate options or negotiate effectively, especially if you’re going from an on-prem to a cloud system. Organizations that assess communication platforms from a position of strength often get better terms, plan out implementations strategically, and avoid the premium costs of urgent migrations.

We've invested heavily in Avaya infrastructure and training. Isn't switching more expensive than staying?

You’ve already spent sunk costs, and the more relevant question is future costs and opportunity costs. To answer it, calculate what you’re paying annually for Avaya maintenance contracts, supplemental tools, IT overhead, and the projects you can’t execute quickly enough. Then factor in the revenue you’re not capturing because you can’t scale for opportunistic campaigns or respond to market windows. Many organizations find that cloud platforms deliver lower TCO within 18-24 months, even with migration costs. The bigger expense is often staying on infrastructure that constrains business agility for years to come.

Can't I just upgrade to a newer Avaya product or use add-ons to solve my issues?

Upgrading within the Avaya ecosystem often means platform migration rather than a simple software update. Moving from an on-prem product like Aura to the cloud-based AXP, for example, involves re-architecting your infrastructure that might be similar in complexity to switching vendors entirely. You’re still making a major investment and accepting significant operational disruption. The question becomes: if you’re going to undertake a migration project anyway, should you move to another Avaya product or evaluate alternatives that don’t have these limitations by design?

In some cases, adding analytics tools, middleware, or reporting layers to your current platform can extend visibility.

However, layering tools on top of an existing deployment may increase complexity, cost, and maintenance requirements. Which again raises the question of whether to extend the current stack or reassess it.

Aren't cloud platforms less reliable than on-premises Avaya systems?

In practice, reliability depends less on “cloud vs. on-premises” and more on architecture, redundancy design, network quality, and vendor operational maturity.

Traditional on-premises Avaya environments depend on local infrastructure: servers, SBCs, hardware redundancy, and internal IT management. Reliability is directly tied to how this infrastructure is designed, maintained, and backed up.

Cloud contact center platforms like Squaretalk operate differently, usually delivering 99.99% uptime. They are typically hosted in geographically distributed data centers with built-in redundancy, automatic failover, continuous monitoring, and managed updates. Cloud contact center software is designed to keep you connected to customers, no matter where your team is located.