We were at the Barbican Centre last week for the London leg of the Avaya EDGE World Tour. The Edge World Tour is an opportunity for Avaya to communicate directly with its most important partners and thank them for their support during a tough year in 2017. It was also an opportunity for Avaya to outline its core strategy for 2018 and ensure that their partners are aligned with that. More than 200 delegates from the partner community attended the event which concluded with the Partner of the Year Awards, with leading partners being recognised for their outstanding support, contribution and commitment to innovation.
Fadi Moubarak, Vice President, Channels, Avaya International, told us how important partners are to Avaya’s success, with over 92% of their business dependant on channel support.
“The 92% speaks for itself, securing full engagement and alignment with our partners is crucial”
Avaya also took the opportunity to thank and reward their partners for their support by announcing a number of new incentive programmes to encourage further growth. The #Loyalthy2gether programme offers their existing customer various incentives to upgrade from their older platforms. The programme provides CS1000 customers with a range of options to take their communications and collaboration solutions to the next level. Avaya hope the programme will encourage more customers to consider their cloud solution packages and consider the benefits of adopting emerging technologies. Ioan MacRae, UK Managing Director explained why.
“By leveraging our investment in cloud offerings, and our advancements in disruptive technologies like AI and blockchain, we are ready to equip our customers, partners, and teams with the tools to meet today’s digital business needs.”
The conclusion of the event was the UK Partner of the Year Awards which celebrated the most successful partners across a range of categories for outstanding growth, innovation and deployments. The full list of winners are detailed below.
· UK Enterprise Distributor of the Year: Westcon
· Contact Centre Partner of the Year: Sabio
· Powered By Cloud Partner of the Year: 6 Degrees
· Private Cloud Deployment of the Year: BT Wholesale and 4net Technologies
· Enterprise Growth Partner of the Year: IP Integration
· Midmarket Growth Partner of the Year: Formation Tech
· Innovation Partner of the Year: 4net Technologies
· Project of the Year: Sabio
We spoke to the co-founders of Formation, Mark Tyers and Dan Cholerton, who are part of the new breed of Avaya partners specialising in cloud focused solutions. Mark explained how the day had been really useful to Formation but also to the other partners present.
“It’s been an interesting day and what they (Avaya) are talking about validates a lot of the hard work we have put in over the last 12-18 months”
The Avaya Edge World Tour is a partner-focused roadshow that has already visited India, Dubai, France and the Netherlands, and continues throughout February 2018 with dates in Germany and Sweden.
