Avaya to Genesys Cloud migration

An Avaya to Genesys Cloud migration usually starts with an estate that has served the business well for a long time. Avaya Aura Communication Manager, Avaya Aura Contact Center, which began life as Nortel Symposium, and IP Office Contact Center all hold years of decisions in their configuration: vectors written for a product launch long ago, skills added one team at a time, announcements recorded for rules nobody remembers. That knowledge is valuable, and much of it is undocumented. Our leadership has worked in contact centre technology since 1984, across Nortel and Avaya platforms as well as Genesys, so we know where these estates tend to hide their most important behaviour, and we plan the move around finding it.

Timing is often set by events outside the contact centre. Avaya introduced a 200-seat monthly minimum agent commitment for its Experience Platform public cloud from 30 June 2025, which led many smaller and mid-sized operations to review their options. Others face hardware refreshes, maintenance renewals or a wider move to cloud services. Genesys Cloud is cloud-native and multi-region, so there is no hardware to refresh and new capabilities arrive continuously. Whatever the trigger, QVCCS helps contact centre leaders and architects turn it into one shared plan, with dates, waves, owners and decisions agreed before any configuration starts.

In Communication Manager, Vector Directory Numbers receive calls and vectors decide what happens next: collect digits, check the time of day, play an announcement, queue to a skill, look up data or route elsewhere. On Genesys Cloud, numbers are assigned to Architect inbound call flows, and in-queue flows control what callers hear while they wait. Time-of-day and holiday conditions become schedules and schedule groups, announcements become recorded or text-to-speech prompts, and lookups become data actions that call your systems through APIs. We map every VDN and vector step to its Genesys Cloud equivalent in the migration inventory, so each behaviour is either carried across deliberately or retired by agreement.

Avaya skills and skill levels, assigned through Expert Agent Selection, become Genesys Cloud queues, ACD skills and proficiency ratings. This is where we recommend thinking rather than copying. Large Avaya estates often hold hundreds of skills, many created as workarounds for routing limits or reporting needs, and carrying them all across reproduces old complexity on a new platform. Our consultants work with your planners and supervisors to rationalise skills, decide where bullseye routing should widen the pool of agents over time, and map Avaya auxiliary reason codes to presence statuses and wrap-up codes. The result is routing your team can understand, report on and change without a specialist.

Reporting and self-service need the same care. Call Management System reports, real-time and historical, are often the language your managers think in, so we agree a report parity list with the people who use them and rebuild each one with Genesys Cloud performance views, dashboards or data exports to your own analytics. Avaya Experience Portal applications built in Orchestration Designer become Architect flows, with data actions for back-end lookups and virtual agents where conversational self-service makes sense. CTI integrations that relied on Application Enablement Services are redesigned for Genesys Cloud integration options and documented in interface contracts, with error handling agreed before anything is built.

Voice connectivity is chosen early because so much depends on it. Genesys Cloud Voice makes Genesys the carrier, BYOC Cloud brings your own carrier's SIP trunks into Genesys Cloud over the internet, and BYOC Premises keeps media on Edge devices in your own sites. Our IT Systems, Telecoms & SIP Engineers assess your current carriers, session border controllers, dial plan and network, then recommend the option that fits. During the migration we connect Avaya and Genesys Cloud with SIP trunks so calls can transfer in either direction. That coexistence is what lets agents move team by team while customers keep dialling the same numbers.

Numbers move last and most carefully. We build a number porting plan with your carrier or Genesys, schedule each port against a cut-over wave and test every number immediately after it moves. Historical recordings held in an Avaya recorder are either retained in a searchable archive until their retention period ends or imported with their metadata, agreed early with your compliance team. Agent equipment is reviewed too: many teams move from desk phones to headsets with WebRTC, which changes network, firewall and quality-of-service requirements. Our site, network and telephony readiness survey covers all of this before the first wave is scheduled.

Discovery comes first and goes deep. We audit the Avaya configuration, including VDNs, vectors, hunt groups, skills, announcements and variables, alongside the CMS report catalogue, Experience Portal applications and every integration, then hold workshops with the people who run the contact centre day to day. Each finding is recorded in a migration inventory with an owner, a priority and a target approach, and carried into the Requirements Traceability Matrix. With that in place we agree, journey by journey, where to keep parity and where to transform, and record each decision in the design decision log before the High-Level Design is written.

We then muster the team from our own bench to suit your estate: an Enterprise Solution Architect who has lived through Avaya and Nortel programmes, an IT Systems, Telecoms & SIP Engineer for trunks, numbers and coexistence, Senior Developers for Architect flows and data actions, a Business Analyst for reports and processes, and test leads for SIT and UAT. QVCCS takes collective responsibility for the outcome, backed by the whole practice through design authority and peer review. We build to the Low-Level Design under our engineering standards, use CX as Code where repeatable configuration helps, and trace every system integration test back to an Avaya behaviour it replaces.

Cut-over happens in waves, never as a single weekend gamble. Each wave has entry and exit criteria, a rehearsed runbook, test calls straight after the change and a rollback plan that can point numbers and routing back to Avaya if a problem appears. Our remote go-live command centre and virtual floor-walking support agents and supervisors through their first shifts, and role-based training prepares people used to Avaya desktops for the Genesys Cloud agent workspace. Supervisors learn the new views of queues and agents before go-live, so nobody is reading a new dashboard for the first time while customers wait.

After the last wave, hypercare continues until the operation is stable and the Avaya platform can be decommissioned on your terms. Support then follows your Genesys Cloud CX consumption model: SLA-based support, up to 24x7x365 where you contract it with QVCCS, or alongside your provider's support as the specialist change and escalation layer. With the move complete, the work turns to what the old estate could not do easily. We help you add digital channels, predictive routing, virtual agents and agent assist on a platform that keeps improving, so the migration becomes the start of something better rather than the end of a project.