Avaya’s partnership with RingCentral has been revamped to help the vendor and its partners generate more revenue, CEO Alan Masarek has told UC Today.
Avaya launched Avaya Cloud Office Powered by RingCentral back in 2019 solely with an agency model, which meant RingCentral owned the customer on paper.
A new deal, brokered around the time Avaya filed for bankruptcy, has added a new wholesale model meaning Avaya and relevant channel partners can own the customer.
“We changed [the contract] in very meaningful ways that I think will generate a lot of seat sales,” he said.
“We would sell in agency model and it would go on RingCentral’s paper; that created some account control issues and there was some reticence to bring to the [customer] base.
“There are no account control issues now.”
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After explaining the new RingCentral partnership, Masarek revealed that Avaya will be taking the Cloud Office Product a step further.
Having previously only reskinned the RingCentral product, the CEO said Avaya is building proprietary integrations that will be exclusive to Avaya Cloud Office.
These will focus on Avaya’s cloud-based customer experience technology, which has been rebranded Experience Platform, and the Elite on-prem contact centre.
“By virtue of having the two models… and having proprietary integrations, I think we’re going to do very well with this relationship,” Masarek added.
Masarek covered a host of subjects during the in-depth interview, including:
- The tough decisions made through the restructuring
- Avaya’s new approach to customer experience
- Future acquisitions and a potential return to the stock market
