Avaya Intros UCaaS Service With RingCentral
At the Engage user show, company also rolls out new mobile app, subscription pay model
Four months after partnering with RingCentral in a move that helped secure their company’s future, Avaya officials are before users this week unveiling communications solutions that address multiple environments from on-premises to mobile to the cloud and a Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) offering with RingCentral.
The Lowdown: Avaya introduced the new and enhanced UCaaS, collaboration app, contact center, and subscription offerings during its Avaya Engage user conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Details: The most significant announcements from Avaya include:
> Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral: The result of the strategic partnership with RingCentral, the offering is being previewed at Engage and will be generally available to partners and customers this spring. It combines RingCentral’s UCaaS platform with Avaya’s phones, services, and migration expertise, delivering cloud services with communications and collaboration capabilities, such as calling, messaging, videoconferencing, and file sharing.
> Avaya Spaces: A mobile app for cloud meetings and team collaboration that integrates voice, video, tasks, and sharing. Users can access the app via any device and take advantage of a persistent online workspace for everything from employee chat and content sharing to online conferencing with HD video and project management.
> Avaya IX Subscription: A flexible payment program for Avaya communication and collaboration tools. The program includes software bundles and Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) rate cards for bundled applications.
> Avaya IX Contact Center: Enhancements include new routing capabilities and speech analytics leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to improve customer interactions and transcribe and analyze voice conversations in real time. Agent desktops combine customer information from multiple sources for a consolidated view, and cloud-based chat, social media, SMS, and e-mail channels are offered with subscription pricing.
Background: Avaya officials had spent months trying to determine the future course of the company, including possibly selling to another company or private equity firm. In October 2019, Avaya entered a partnership with RingCentral in which the company would become Avaya’s exclusive provider of UCaaS technology and would pay Avaya about $500 million for a stake in the company, licensing rights, and commission.
The Buzz: “Major trends are accelerating rapidly and opening the doors to completely new ways to communicate and collaborate – from the shift to cloud and the growth of video and mobile across the enterprise to harnessing the power of AI and machine learning,” Avaya President and CEO Jim Chirico said. “Market leaders are disrupting the status quo, not just by innovating in one of these areas but by bringing new technologies together across the communications infrastructure to transform customer and employee experiences.”
“Today, we are experiencing change at a stunning pace, and Avaya continues to rapidly innovate high-impact solutions based on deep insight into our changing digital landscape,” said Simon Harrison, Avaya’s chief marketing officer. “A multi-experience approach to blending unified communications, contact center, and collaboration tools can provide an extremely useful way to address these changes and help organizations and their customers frame their strategies for adapting to the future.”
“For many customers, moving to a subscription model for their on-premises communication infrastructure is a logical next step in their journey to the cloud – or to accelerate their overall business transformation,” said Frank Ciccone, senior vice president of sales at Avaya. “This highlights our commitment to better meet the needs of our clients and guide them on a transition path to the future in a way that works best for their business. It is also another example of our strategy to increase the value and flexibility of our UC and CC solutions to address our customers’ evolving requirements.”
“Many enterprise customers are not ready to move all of their communications systems to the cloud, but they would still like the benefits of paying only for the services they use and the flexibility to adapt as needed,” said Stephanie Watson, general manager at MZA. “The world is not either on-premises or cloud … and the cloud hybrid model will be a critical transition option for most large enterprises. Avaya understands this and is making life in a hybrid world much easier for their customers.”
“By bringing RingCentral’s industry-leading unified communications platform together with Avaya, our aim is to help businesses empower employees to communicate, collaborate, and work better together and best serve their customers and partners,” RingCentral President and COO Anand Eswaran said. “We look forward to the ongoing collaboration with Avaya that will continue to enhance and strengthen our partnership and bring industry-leading solutions to customers.”
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CHANNELNOMICS: RingCentral, Avaya Partner on UCaaS
