Avaya Experience Platform migration in practice
The CFO of an Ahmedabad NBFC asked which AXP tier we would move him to. That is not actually the question. The question is whether he can move to AXP at all this year, because his agent count sits below the floor that Avaya set on Public Cloud in June 2025.
Two firms called us in the same week last quarter. Same reseller. Same aging Aura + CM stack. Different fork in the road.
The two starting points looked the same on paper
Firm A is an NBFC in Ahmedabad. 118 seats. Aura 8.1, CM 8. Their reseller had quoted them AXP Public Cloud last September and then quietly re-quoted them Private Cloud in December. Nobody told the CFO why. That silence was the reason he called.
Firm B is a D2C brand in Bengaluru. 340 seats. Same Aura release, one extra Session Manager pair, and a Session Border Controller sitting in front of a SIP trunk from an Indian carrier. Their reseller had quoted them AXP Public Cloud with no re-quote and no footnote.
On the surface: same product, same platform, one quote each. Underneath: two different migrations, because one firm sits below the 200-agent monthly minimum that Avaya set on AXP Public Cloud from 30 June 2025. I had to look it up twice before I believed the reseller had not mentioned it in either room.
Firm A: the 118-seat NBFC that could not fit AXP Public Cloud
At 118 concurrent agents the NBFC does not qualify for Public Cloud pricing. Their choices, matlab, narrow down to three.
The first is AXP Private Cloud. Avaya-managed, single-tenant, hosted in an Indian region for residency. Higher unit cost, but the 200-seat floor does not apply. Good for a compliance-first buyer who can absorb the premium.
The second is Ava-based hybrid: keeping some Aura on-prem while extending digital channels and analytics through AXP components. Lower upfront cash, longer roadmap, higher operational drag from running two control planes.
The third is a rebuild on a different vendor. Genesys Cloud CX and Amazon Connect both quote sub-200 seats in India without a seat floor, and both pitch Avaya migrations directly. Most resellers do not raise this on their own.
The NBFC picked AXP Private Cloud because the CIO had a live DPDP audit closing in 60 days and did not want a platform swap on top of a compliance file. Defensible, not cheapest. Their 3-year TCO landed about 27% above the sub-200 Genesys quote we had put on the table for comparison. The CFO signed anyway. Continuity beat sticker.
Firm B: the 340-seat D2C that walked into Public Cloud with eyes open
At 340 seats, the Bengaluru D2C is comfortably above the floor. They took the reseller quote at face value and asked us to sanity check.
Two things we made them add to the plan before signing.
One, the Session Border Controller. AXP Public Cloud does not include SBC licensing for their SIP trunk. Their existing on-prem SBC was end-of-support inside 14 months. Either extend a paid support window or replace with a cloud-friendly SBC on the migration cutover. They picked replace, which added ~₹22 lakh to the year-one spend that the reseller quote did not carry.
Two, agent identity. Their operators log in with Entra ID today. AXP Public Cloud onboarding needs the identity mapping done cleanly, or you get soft-locked out of admin functions in week two while support opens a ticket. I have seen this soft-lock hit two customers in the last year and it takes 3 to 5 business days to clear, pakka. Book identity mapping into the pre-cutover checklist, not into the go-live sprint.
With those two adds, their AXP Public Cloud year-one landed roughly in line with the reseller number they had been shown. Their 3-year TCO came in about 12% below Firm A because the Public Cloud unit cost is meaningfully lower at their scale.
Where the two migrations diverged in month 3
For the first eight weeks the two migrations look nearly identical on the Gantt: assessment, workstream kickoff, licence PLDS extract, WebLM audit, integration inventory, low-code Ava studio walkthroughs. Achha, standard.
Month 3 is where they split.
Firm B (Public Cloud, 340 seats) enters UAT. Their engineers are testing digital channel routing on a live sandbox with real WhatsApp Business API traffic. Two agent groups are pilot users. The ops team is watching queues on the AXP console with the reseller sharing screen. Cutover is on the calendar for the middle of month 4.
Firm A (Private Cloud, 118 seats) is not in UAT. Their engineers are still trying to get the in-house CRM connector to authenticate against the Private Cloud API gateway, which is set up differently to the Public Cloud path the reseller’s playbook was written for. The usual customer engineer is on rotation for a larger EMEA rollout; their backup is still ramping. This is where I changed my mind on my own advice, bas. Going in, I would have told Firm A the Private Cloud premium was mostly a pricing decision. In hindsight, a chunk of that premium is a scarcity-of-implementation-attention tax. Private Cloud gets fewer partner engineers because the deal size supports fewer.
We flagged this to Sudeep and pushed to get their AMC to include named integration support. Only after that did month 3 look survivable.
What the reseller quotes did not include
Neither reseller line item covered any of the following. This is the list I now ask every Indian buyer to demand in writing before signing an AXP proposal.
| Line item | Firm A (Private Cloud) | Firm B (Public Cloud) | Typical cost band |
|---|---|---|---|
| SBC re-licence or replace | required if 3+ year old SBC | required if 3+ year old SBC | ₹8 to ₹25 lakh year 1 |
| Identity mapping to Entra ID or Okta | 2 to 4 weeks pre-cutover | 2 to 4 weeks pre-cutover | ₹3 to ₹6 lakh |
| Parallel run of Aura and AXP | 6 to 8 weeks recommended | 4 to 6 weeks recommended | 12 to 18% of year-1 platform spend |
| Data migration for historical CDR and recordings | often out of scope | often out of scope | ₹5 to ₹15 lakh |
| CRM connector re-certification | in-house build usually | pre-certified more likely | ₹4 to ₹10 lakh |
| Named integration engineer (partner) | negotiate into AMC | included at higher tiers | ₹8 to ₹12 lakh annual |
| E911-equivalent number routing setup | required for on-prem callback | required for on-prem callback | ₹2 to ₹4 lakh |
| Training for supervisors and QA leads | often out of scope | included at higher tiers | ₹3 to ₹6 lakh |
The point is not the exact numbers. Your carrier, SBC vendor, and integration partner will move these bands by 30% either way. The point is that a reseller quote with three lines and no footnotes hides six line items your CFO will see in the first two quarters. Ask now.
If you want a Sirius Star reader to look at your AXP proposal before you sign, we can go through it with you.
What we would do differently next time
Two things I would change if we ran either of these again from day zero.
One, we would ask the reseller for their AXP deployment reference in India at the buyer’s exact seat band before the first quote. Not a global logo list. A seat-band-matched Indian customer. If the reseller cannot name one, the deployment attention risk is higher than the price sheet suggests, especially on Private Cloud. This is a lesson from Firm A. If we had asked in September we would have anticipated the month-3 stall.
Two, we would separately quote the identity mapping and SBC work with an infra partner, not with the AXP reseller. Bundling them under one line makes the reseller quote look tidy and hides the two most common landmines. Splitting them puts the risk on the surface where the CIO can see it. This is a lesson from Firm B, where we caught the SBC line before signing and Sudeep specifically asked for it to be broken out.
There is a third thing but I am less sure of it: Firm A’s 60-day DPDP-driven decision may have been the right call for reasons that had nothing to do with platform. Continuity in an audit window is worth real money. I would still recommend Private Cloud in that scenario, matlab, but with the AMC-integrated integration engineer as a non-negotiable.
Key takeaways
- The 200-agent Public Cloud floor from June 2025 is the fork in the road for Indian mid-market. Under 200 seats, AXP means Private Cloud, hybrid, or off-Avaya. Above 200 seats, Public Cloud is on the table.
- Reseller quotes routinely omit SBC re-licence, identity mapping, parallel run, and CRM connector re-certification. Ask for those in writing before you sign.
- Private Cloud carries a scarcity-of-integration-attention risk, not just a unit-price premium. Get named integration engineer support into the AMC.
- Month 3 is where paths diverge on effort. Plan the runway with that split in mind, not the reseller’s flat-percentage-per-week Gantt.
FAQ
Is AXP available in India? Yes. Public Cloud launched in India in 2024. Private Cloud is delivered from Indian regions via partners. Residency for regulated buyers works on both.
What is the 200-agent minimum on AXP Public Cloud? Avaya set a monthly floor of 200 agent seats effective 30 June 2025. Under that count you are on Private Cloud, hybrid, or off-Avaya. Often missing from reseller conversations with sub-200 buyers.
How long does an AXP migration take for a mid-market Indian contact centre? For a clean 100 to 400 seat estate on Aura 8 with one SBC and one CRM connector, plan 14 to 20 weeks from kickoff to steady state. Public Cloud usually lands at the shorter end.
Should we consider a non-Avaya rebuild? For sub-200 seat estates with no strong Aura dependency, yes, at least as a comparison. Genesys Cloud CX and Amazon Connect will both quote. A 3-way bake-off usually saves 15 to 25% on 3-year TCO. Retraining time is the trade-off.
What does DPDP mean for our contact centre migration? Recording residency, agent-side masking, consent capture on inbound channels. Put them on the migration checklist, not on a follow-up ticket after go-live. See when to migrate off old Avaya Aura for the compliance framing.
P.S. Karthik here. Both firms had the same reseller. Neither reseller call mentioned the 200-agent floor first. If your reseller has not raised it and your seat count is anywhere near 180 or 220, that is the first question to ask them, before the price. If you want a second opinion, we are on WhatsApp at +91 91375 93228, 10 to 7 IST.
Related reading from Sirius Star
- Avaya India platform overview
- Pune BPO Avaya licence audit day
- When to migrate off old Avaya Aura
- Avaya vs Cisco for Indian contact centres
- Reading an Avaya licence true-up
Sources
- Avaya AXP Evolution partner notices
- Avaya AXP Public Cloud India launch, CX Today
- Comstice AXP guide, on the 200-agent Public Cloud minimum
