Avaya Cloud Office By RingCentral Now Available To The Masses Working Remotely
‘We have Avaya die-hards and we are ready to start selling Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral,’ says one Avaya partner.
Avaya Cloud Office powered by RingCentral is now generally available to business customers and through the channel, just in time to quell the need for remote work solutions as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, according to Avaya.
Unified communications powerhouse Avaya and RingCentral formally unveiled the highly-anticipated UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) offering in February. Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) by RingCentral offers calling, messaging, video conferencing, file sharing and collaboration across any device or user location.
"The product is ready -- not even a pandemic can get in our way," said Dennis Kozak, senior vice president of business transformation for Avaya. "We believe that even with economic uncertainty, there's a lot of demand for a product like this."
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Avaya has piqued the curiosity of the channel once again with its Cloud Office by RingCentral offering, a recurring revenue opportunity, said Rick Ribas, senior vice president of channel sales for Intelisys, a Petaluma, Calif.-based master agent that is owned by ScanSource, which partners with Avaya.
"The offering has a lot of great capabilities, and not having to rip and replace anything is a huge asset," Ribas said.
Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral is built on RingCentral’s open platform that offers more than 200 pre-built integrations with cloud applications, so users can still use their legacy UC and collaboration tools -- including Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and Google G-Suite.
Mark Morgan, president for Intelisys, said that the offering is an opportunity for both ScanSource's embedded base of Avaya VARs and Intelisys' agents, who are used to selling born-in-the-cloud solutions.
"We have Avaya die-hards and we are ready to start selling Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral," Morgan said.
Kozak said the pipeline of partners signing up to sell ACO is strong with nearly 800 channel partners onboarded so far. The offering has not only been popular with existing Avaya partners, but solution providers that Avaya hasn't been able to access in the past.
In addition to ScanSource's Intelisys, Avaya has also signed with Jenne, Inc., AVANT Communications, Synnex, and Telarus, to sell ACO by RingCentral.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Avaya does about 80 percent of its business though the channel today and about 85 percent of its business comes from premise-based solutions. Since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017, however, Avaya has been shifting the business to focus more on cloud. Avaya in January announced it would end sales of its Powered By Avaya IP Office solution and focus its resources on Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral.
Avaya said that sales and partner training have been underway since February for sellers trained across enterprise, midmarket, SMB and SLED customer segments.