Avaya vs Cisco for Indian contact centres: a Gurugram boardroom argument

The meeting was set for 5.30 pm on a Tuesday. It ended after 8. That is usually the sign a shortlist has become an argument.

A 480-seat BPO in Gurugram was renewing its contact centre platform. Their Avaya Aura setup had been running for eleven years. It worked. It also cost them a small fortune every quarter in agent licences, and the SI who owned the deployment kept sending upgrade proposals with numbers that made the CFO close the PDF and open a spreadsheet instead.

Two people were driving the decision. Their VP-IT, who had lived with Avaya since 2014 and knew where every routing script lived. And their new Head of CX, who had joined from a Bengaluru fintech that ran Webex Contact Center end to end. Both had strong opinions. Both were right about different things.

I was in the room because they asked for a second opinion. Here is what came out of that Tuesday.

The first question was not which product. It was which world.

Their VP-IT started with the case for Avaya. Not the emotional case. The practical one.

They had 480 agents on Avaya Aura, running Elite Multichannel for email and chat, with CMS reports going to team leaders every morning. Eleven years of IVR scripting sat in that platform. Payment collection flows, callback logic, skill-based routing for four Indian languages plus English. The Communication Manager server was on-prem in their Gurugram office because their BFSI clients had asked for it in the SOW.

“If we move,” he said, “we do not move a product. We move eleven years of decisions.” He was not wrong.

The Head of CX made the case for Cisco Webex Contact Center. They already had Webex Calling for 200 users in corporate. Their newer clients were asking for AI-assisted agents, sentiment analysis, and integration with Salesforce Service Cloud without a middleware layer. Webex Contact Center did that natively. Avaya’s Infinity Platform had rebranded from Experience Platform in 2025 and now offered similar capability, but the migration story inside Avaya from Aura to Infinity was, in their SI’s words, not a lift and shift.

Both had a point. This is the split that decides most Indian contact centre refreshes today. Which side of the fence are you already on?

Where Avaya still wins for Indian buyers

Avaya’s on-premise heritage still matters here. If a client’s SOW says the voice platform must sit inside their DC, or their compliance officer wants call recording storage under Indian jurisdiction with a documented chain of custody, Avaya’s on-premise or private cloud deployment gives you a straight answer.

Their workforce engagement stack is deeper. Gamification, adherence tracking, quality management, and coaching workflows are inside the platform. You do not need a separate NICE or Verint subscription to do agent scheduling. For a 500-seat BPO that runs three shifts and cares about attrition, that is a real number on the licence sheet you do not have to pay.

The entry pricing is also lower per seat. Avaya starts around USD 30 per user per month for cloud entry tiers, and their on-premise perpetual licences with annual support work out cheaper at scale beyond 300 seats if your capex model allows it. Cisco Webex Contact Center’s tiered pricing sits higher, and you tend to bolt on Webex Calling separately.

And the incumbent tax matters. Retraining 480 agents on a new soft-phone, updating desktop CRM connectors, migrating IVR scripts, and re-provisioning SIP trunks costs money and calm. If your Avaya works and your business does not need new capability urgently, staying is a decision, not a default.

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Where Cisco Webex Contact Center pulls ahead

The Head of CX pushed on three things and all three landed.

First, Webex integration. If your organisation is already on Webex Calling or Microsoft Teams for corporate voice, running Webex Contact Center means one identity, one admin console, and one telephony fabric. The agent uses the same Webex app for internal calls and customer calls. IT stops managing two overlapping vendor stacks. This is the number one reason mid-market Indian enterprises pick Cisco over Avaya today.

Second, AI features. Cisco released Webex AI Agent Studio and expanded its Webex Contact Center AI suite through 2025 and into 2026. Real-time agent assist, call summarisation, and automated wrap-up notes are inside the licence tiers, not add-ons. Avaya has similar capability now inside Infinity, but the setup is heavier and the ecosystem of tested partner AI models is smaller. For a BPO whose clients are asking for AI proof points in every RFP, this matters.

Third, cloud economics without a capex conversation. Webex Contact Center is subscription. Add or remove seats each month. If your business runs seasonal peaks, or you are still growing seat count year over year, subscription pricing lines up with how the business grows. No hardware refresh cycle to plan for.

The trade-off Cisco carries is complexity at the enterprise end. Cisco UCCE and its ICM scripting environment still require experienced engineers to deploy well. Even Webex Contact Center’s Flow Designer has a learning curve. And SMS routing inside Webex has known limitations if your contact centre runs heavy transactional SMS, which most Indian BFSI ones do.

The three questions that actually decide it

By 7.20 pm the argument had narrowed. Not to which product was better. To which questions the answer depended on. We wrote three on the whiteboard.

One. What does your telephony fabric look like today? If you already run Webex Calling or plan to inside 12 months, Webex Contact Center is a natural next step. If you run a mixed estate, or your PBX is Avaya Aura with recent investment, staying inside Avaya reduces friction.

Two. How many seats and what growth trajectory? Under 250 seats, cloud subscription usually wins on total cost, ease of setup, and speed to features. Between 250 and 1000 seats, the maths gets closer. Above 1000 seats with predictable volume, on-premise or private cloud Avaya can be cheaper over five years if your capex is willing.

Three. How much of your differentiator lives inside the contact centre platform? If your IVR is a strategic asset that took years to build and integrates with core banking or a hospital HIS, migrating that logic is a project, not a purchase. If your contact centre is standard queues, skill routing, and CRM screen-pop, migration is manageable.

What the Gurugram BPO decided

Their answer was neither Avaya nor Cisco in the pure sense. It was a phased plan.

Keep Avaya Aura live for the BFSI clients whose SOWs required on-premise voice for the next 24 months. Migrate two of their newer clients, both non-regulated retail and D2C accounts, to Webex Contact Center inside six months. Use that migration as their proof-of-concept for the AI features their pipeline was asking about. Reassess the full estate at the 18-month mark.

It was not clean. It was also honest. Their Avaya investment still had life. Their Webex opportunity was real. Running both for a defined window let them learn without betting the operation.

Their CFO signed the phased plan the next morning. The SI took longer to accept it, but that is a different story.

Quick comparison for Indian buyers

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What Indian buyers ask us that these comparisons miss

Do call recordings need to sit inside India for DPDP compliance? If the data is Indian customer voice data, our advice is yes, keep primary storage in an Indian data centre or region. Both Avaya and Cisco offer this now, but you have to specify it in the SOW. It does not happen by default on public cloud tiers.

What about TRAI TCCCPR compliance for outbound? If your contact centre does outbound, especially transactional or promotional calls, TRAI’s revised regulations under TCCCPR 2018 and the 2024 amendments require consent management and DND scrubbing. Neither Avaya nor Cisco give you this out of the box. You need a compliance layer, often through your telecom operator or a third-party DLT platform. Ask your integrator.

Does existing SIP trunk investment carry over? Mostly yes. Both platforms accept standard SIP from Airtel, Tata Tele, or your existing telco. Some contract renegotiation is normal, and there is a cutover weekend either way.

Key takeaways

• The Avaya vs Cisco question is really the on-premise vs cloud question, and the incumbent vs greenfield question, wearing different clothes.
• Cheap per-seat pricing hides the migration month and the compliance layer. Model total cost of ownership over 36 months, not just monthly licence.
• If your Aura works, has a supported version, and your business is not asking for AI proof points urgently, staying is a valid answer for now.
• If you already run Webex Calling, or you are ready to rebuild your IVR anyway, Webex Contact Center is usually the more future-proof pick.
• Phased migration is under-rated. Running both for 12 to 18 months costs more in the short term and buys you decisions you cannot make on a slide deck.

If you want to see the actual working paper we handed the Gurugram BPO’s CFO, or you want a straight opinion on your own contact centre refresh, we are happy to talk. Sirius Star has been running Avaya deployments for Indian businesses since 2011. We also do Webex Contact Center migrations when that is the right call. See our Avaya contact centre practice for India for the current shape of what we support.

For related reading on decisions like this: our field notes on the 300 seats nobody was using in a Pune BPO Avaya licence audit, on when to migrate off old Avaya Aura for a Chennai insurer, and on what SASE means for an Indian business buyer if you are also modernising your network in the same refresh cycle.

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P.S. Anjali here. I have sat in enough of these Tuesday-evening arguments to know the same thing every time. Both sides have real points. The team that decides badly is the one that decides fast because the SI wants a signature this quarter. The team that decides well is the one that writes down the three questions on the whiteboard and answers them before signing anything. Reach us on WhatsApp at +91 91375 93228 during 10-7 IST if you want a second pair of eyes on your shortlist.