Avaya CEO Talks Enhanced RingCentral Team-Up, Partner Opportunity

Extending beyond revenue, Avaya CEO Alan Masarek shared that he sees plenty of partner opportunities in the new joint offer with RingCentral.

"ACO as a SKU has been sold directly and via partners; that means through agents and VARs, which has been successful for them," Masarek said. 

The opportunity to sell the integration, which is still without a brand but could become something like "Avaya Hybrid Office" (AHO), Maserek told Channel Futures, is only the beginning. 

The goal is to extend native integration with vendors across the unified communications environment that want to go on what he called a "journey" with Avaya, just as it has done with Zoom, and now RingCentral for the second time. 

The main takeaway from Masarek regarding the newfound joint offer is that "it is another product the channel can sell."

"We have an integration with Microsoft Teams, which is more API-based, but hopefully, we can create a more native integration with Teams," Masarek asserted. 

He did so while hinting at Avaya wanting to beef up its partnership efforts with the platform that boasts some 320 million monthly active users, a number that's still rising quickly.

From a value perspective, Masarek said there is "real value" from a customer point of view "because they own hardware that has likely already depreciated, so they could rip it out and go to ACO, Zoom Phone, Vonage, or whatever they want.

"But they are going to pay a hell of a lot more for the price of that cloud telephony than if they integrate their on-prem telephony into the cloud UI, and we can upcharge them, which is still not as expensive as a full rip-and-replace," the Avaya CEO told Channel Futures.

And this, at least from an elevated revenue outlook, could fare well for partners. 

"We have had situations where we lost basic telephony to Teams Voice, but that makes no sense to us; we want to keep all seats on Aura and integrate it with the collab because it is cheaper for the customer," Masarek told us.  

Regarding the case of RingCentral, since there is also a unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) play at hand, Masarek shared, "I'd be just as happy if all seats went to ACO because we get paid for that too." 

In a sense, Avaya is serving as a reseller, with the SaaS sale presenting partners with the prospect of higher margins in the form of recurring revenue.

In a sense, Avaya is serving as a reseller, with the SaaS sale presenting partners with the prospect of higher margins in the form of recurring revenue.