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In March Avaya unveiled its new Breeze platform, which is aimed at helping developers easily implement communications capabilities into new or existing applications. This month the company staged a Breeze hackathon and introduced a customer engagement solution called Oceana, which is based on Breeze.

As Bernard Gutnick, senior director of the engagement evangelist organization at Avaya (News - Alert), explained in a June 17 blog, the Avaya Breeze Summit and Hackathon took place at the recent International Avaya Users Group event in Orlando, Fla. The summit and hackathon provided developers with no prior experience with Avaya Breeze just five hours of instruction on the platform, which features drag-and-drop workflow capability. They were then challenged to create Breeze applications within 24 hours.

The contest resulted in a tie between Carlson Wagonlit Travel and The Standard. Carlson Wagonlit Travel leveraged Avaya Breeze to add a click-to-call option to its website. The Standard leveraged Breeze to reduce five Avaya solutions to two and created omnichannel and self-service solutions.

Prizes were provided by Plantronics (News - Alert), Dave Pennell of Avaya Learning, and Valerie Health of Avaya Collaboratory provided the prizes.

As noted above, Avaya also introduced the new Oceana solution at its International Avaya Users Group. The new customer engagement platform includes Oceananalytics, which offers analytics and reporting about customers across Avaya and other vendors’ systems; Oceana Workspaces, a browser-based interface that agents, supervisors, and others can use to get a view of the customer; and Avaya Vantage and Avaya Breeze Client SDK, which allow communications to be embedded into business applications and unify different communications channels. Avaya also now offers Enterprise Software Subscription, which allows customers to buy Avaya Team Engagement and Customer Engagement on a subscription basis

All of the above are reportedly moves by Avaya to strengthen its position in the contact center space.

Avaya’s recently formed subsidiary Zang is another move on this front. Zang was created to offer a communications platform as a service that can enable companies to quickly bring real-time communications to a variety of applications and to introduce new stand-alone applications. Mohammad Nezarati, the leader of UC applications at Avaya and former CEO of Esna Technologies (which Avaya bought last year), earlier this year wasb named general manager of Zang.

This comes at a time in which Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital LP are considering selling Avaya, according to reports. As a May Reuters (News - Alert) story notes, that’s against a backdrop in which companies like Avaya are transitioning from their legacy hardware businesses to offering more software-centric and subscription-based services.