After a ton of build-up, Avaya Cloud Office, powered by RingCentral, is today, generally available in the United States, and will hit the UK by summer, I’m told. Avaya recently made the announcement, which the company said was the beginning of a new era at Avaya, back in February when I visited Phoenix Arizona for Avaya’s annual ENGAGE developer conference and brought you exclusive UC Today coverage.
We’ve come a long way since late 2019 when the two first announced they’d partner to create a world-class UCaaS solution for businesses. At the same time, Avaya said it would end the use of its popular solution ‘Powered by Avaya IP’ to focus on RingCentral-backed UCaaS offering in select countries.
Present-day, and 500 million dollars later, Avaya’s UCaaS solution is here, or at least nearly here if you’re not in the US. The new UCaaS platform is simple to use, and I found this out first-hand when I got an in-person preview of the UC tool at Avaya ENGAGE. It lets organizations, contact centers, and other enterprises communicate with customers, partners, and coworkers across many channels via a centralized platform.
It also enables voice calls, team messaging, meetings, video conferencing, file sharing, and has a host of features designed to keep employees productive as well as ease-of-integration with Avaya J-series devices including the J139, J169, and J179. Avaya President and CEO, Jim Chirico, said in a statement:
“Avaya Cloud Office provides a comprehensive yet simple communications app for a world where communications and collaboration tools are more critical than ever before. As we engage our extensive customer base to help them address the rapidly evolving future of work”
Avaya Cloud Office was much-anticipated because UCaaS is highly-scalable. On top of that, Avaya has industry-leading security and support, two key selling points. There’s also RingCentral’s robust open platform APIs and over 200 pre-built business solution integrations. All this, combined with Avaya’s enterprise-grade features and services will add a lot of value to enterprises looking to beef up communications across the board.
The newly-released UCaaS offering creates an even better even value proposition for partners, something RingCentral VP Product Management, Ritu Mukherjee, acknowledged during an exclusive interview telling me, “Partners are Avaya’s crown jewels.” She continued, saying, “RingCentral is the first cloud provider to offer plug-and-go deployment on Avaya phones, and I am sure it will not be the last.”
Avaya said its signed up five master agents who plan to launch Avaya Cloud Office, including Jenne, Inc., ScanSource, Inc., AVANT Communications, Synnex Corporation, and Telarus LLC. According to a company spokesperson, Avaya has almost 800 channel partners trained to sell Avaya Cloud Office, the majority of them new to selling ACO.
Over the past two months, sales and partner training’s been underway, and now, there are over a thousand sellers trained across the enterprise, midmarket, SMB, and SLED customer segments. The launch of Avaya Cloud Office Powered by RingCentral comes at an interesting paradigm shift for those in enterprise communications.
In other news, Avaya’s enabled more than two million remote workers for more than 11,000 companies worldwide. Avaya’s solution, Avaya OneCloud™, which won the distinction of the ‘Quickest path to cloud for large enterprises’ is now available in general availability, too.
