https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2021 MSP 501 Application
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2021 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2021 MSP 501 Application
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2021 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Digital Service Providers
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • CHANNEL PARTNERS ONLINE
 Channel Futures

Mobility


Baseball Home Run

Avaya Aims to Hit Quarter ‘Out of the Park’

  • Written by Jeffrey Schwartz
  • March 28, 2018
Avaya hopes to end its first quarter since emerging from chapter 11 and resuming as a publicly traded company on a strong note with a new pipeline of cloud and AI solutions, a new master-agent program and a late-inning incentive push.

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of 20 top UCaaS providers offering products and services via channel partners.**

Capping three months that included a wave of new technology introductions designed to pave its future path, Avaya is looking to close out its first quarter since its Jan. 17 return as a publicly traded company on a high note.

As the quarter winds down this week, Avaya is offering partners incentives for any home-grown deals – those not already in the funnel – with 3 percent rebates. In the spirit of the opening of the Major League Baseball season, Gary Levy, VP of Avaya’s Americas Channel, is swinging for the fences.

“We see opportunities to really hit this quarter out of the park,” Levy said, speaking at last week’s New York City stop on its Avaya Innovation Tour road show, touting its new technology road map and channel programs.

“We want to make sure we see our estimates and our goals, and we want to help you,” Levy added. The incentive is a rebate that doesn’t require partners to go through a special bid process but must be those that partners had picked up from their customers, he said.

Avaya threw that offer into the mix last week, along with the launch of its new master-agent program, aimed at creating a distribution tier certified to work with MSPs and resellers. As agents, they can offer Avaya’s IP Office portfolio of cloud-based unified communications services, bundled carrier services, SIP trunks and desktop conferencing services. Under the program, MSPs and resellers can sell the service as part of their solutions with Avaya providing support.

“It’s a simple storefront that will enable agents to procure, implement and service the customers into a new route to market as well as, I would say, an expanded level of interaction with not only the agents but the distributor as well,” Levy said.

Value-added distributor Jenne is the first master agent to announce it has signed on, with approximately a dozen in the queue — to be announced in the coming weeks, Levy said in an interview. “We’re excited about bringing this cloud-agent program to market and the ability for customers of all sizes to procure the product through the agents,” he said.

Serving as a master agent is nothing new for Jenne, which has similar arrangements with several major CPE and cloud PBX hosting providers including Mitel, Ring Central and 8×8, and also with Polycom for phones.

“I think this is a really compelling offer against all of those,” Travis Frilling, director of Avaya Solutions at Jenne, said during a brief interview at the Avaya event.

“There’s over 600,000 IP Office seats deployed. It’s tried and true, there’s a lot greater sample size with Avaya in the communications space than anyone else. The master-agent model allows us to bring an offer to people we haven’t been able to bring. Not everyone is a technical and certified agent that can just roll up and install IP Office. This allows IP Office to get into new markets.”

Technology Road Map Targets New Solutions

In a push to transition its portfolio with competitive cloud and a modern communications software and services, Avaya officials also described key pieces of its technology road map that it sees serving various use cases. The company has showcased three key verticals: insurance, hospitality and health care, including patient monitoring and offering caregivers real-time information. The acquisition of Spoken Communications, announced in January at the Avaya Engage customer and partner conference, closed this month and will play a key role in the delivery of new solutions, company officials emphasized. Spoken has implications for both new customers looking for a cloud-based omnichannel contact center that supports voice, chat and other customer interaction modalities, as well as existing customers and partners that use its Aura Call Center Elite.

The fact that Spoken already offered integration with the Elite platform played a key role in the deal, said Jean Turgeon, Avaya’s chief technologist, in an interview at last week’s event. “It’s already in the market, so we’re positioning those solutions to help customers transition to a cloud offering,” Turgeon said.

Two weeks ago, at the annual Enterprise Connect communications industry conference in Orlando, Avaya demonstrated how the Spoken platform integrates with Salesforce.com CRM apps.

Avaya’s Jean Turgeon at the company’s Innovation Edge Tour stop in New York, March 20, 2018.

“Now we’re pushing the envelope with all of the other channels, but the other big piece that was critical to us was the Intelligent Wire, which brings much more sophistication from our natural language processing and a tight integration with already strategic partners like Salesforce,” Turgeon said.

Avaya also introduced new cloud-based team collaboration to its Equinox Experience, letting customers create their own team rooms. The new user interface now brings together voice, video, chat communications channels, calendar and meetings. Company officials also demonstrated Ava, a new platform to enable AI, chatbot and natural language processing into its various offerings, which will include support for Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home interfaces.

Avaya Mobile Experience

In addition, the company will deliver the Avaya Mobile Experience, designed to enable its call-center customers to identify calls originating from mobile phones. Those calls are directed to enable a mobile web app experience to provide a richer experience, but also to terminate the use of costly 800 service lines.

Avaya estimates 70 percent of calls coming into a customer-service center now come from mobile phones. The Avaya Mobile Experience can reduce reliance on 800 lines, which are costly to call-center operators, but don’t offer any savings to mobile callers, now that all calling plans have unlimited voice. Organizations with Avaya Breeze, the company’s workflow integration platform, can use its snap-ins to enable WebRTC and co-browsing support. Avaya has partnered with Post Quantum to offer Identity as a Service (IDaaS). In context of the Avaya Mobile Experience, it will identify that an incoming call is from a mobile device, giving the customer the option of a multimedia digital experience.

Building on Blockchain

The IDaaS platform Avaya is working on with Post Quantum will allow for biometric authentication and use blockchain to authenticate credentials and provide recordable transactions that offer verifiable audit. The capability will be offered with the Avaya Mobile Experience and also as a separate service to provide higher-level protection services against fraudulent transactions. Blockchain is well suited for this purpose, Turgeon told attendees at the New York Avaya Innovate event last week.

“At a high level it’s the concept of a write-once distributed architecture, so when I write a record, all of the participants in the blockchain get a copy of that record and that record can only be written once,” he said. “Think about contracts. If I have a legal contract with you, I want to make sure that someone did not cheat and make some changes to my financial records. This is a logical way to start tracking transactions. This is why blockchain is important.”

Noting the buzz around blockchain these days, Turgeon emphasized it’s not developing products based on the technology but using it. “Avaya is not a developer of blockchain solutions,” he said. “We will be consuming blockchain technology.”

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Channel Programs Cloud Mergers and Acquisitions Mobility Networking Security Strategy Technologies Voice/Connectivity

Related


  • CP-Expo-Logo-1050x618 web
    Channel Partners Virtual Wraps — See You In Person at CP Expo Homecoming
    So long, Channel Partners Virtual. But what a week it was. Now, our live event is on tap.
  • Growth
    Auth0 Acquisition to Power Okta's Growth in Massive Identity Market
    Together, Okta and Auth0 address a broad set of identity use cases.
  • Integration gears
    Microsoft Integrates Dynamics 365 and Teams, Reveals New Features
    CEO Satya Nadella described Teams as the “organizing layer” for all work in an Ignite keynote.
  • Digital handshake
    Clearlake, TA Associates Buy Precisely in $3.5 Billion Deal
    Precisely's partners are crucial to the company and its growth.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • Day 2 at Channel Partners Virtual Complete, with a Packed Day 3 Ahead
  • Multi-Cloud: Strategy or Inevitable Outcome? (or both?)
  • Channel Futures & Channel Partners Announce Key Initiatives for 2021
  • KnowBe4 to Buy MediaPro, Beef Up Privacy, Compliance Training

Galleries

View all

From The Second City: How to Use Improv as a Business Tool

March 3, 2021

Industry Perspectives

View all

5 Ways XDR Can Improve Operational Efficiency for MSPs

March 4, 2021

Multi-Cloud: Strategy or Inevitable Outcome? (or both?)

March 3, 2021

Backup Vulnerability: 4 Targets Hackers Might Utilize to Infiltrate Your Backup Solution

March 2, 2021

Webinars

View all

A Partner’s Perspective on Channel Success in 2021

March 23, 2021

XDR and Why it Matters to MSPs

March 24, 2021

Top Security Trends Impacting Technology Security Providers In 2021

March 25, 2021

White Papers

View all

Why Fortinet for my MSSP?

March 2, 2021

Small and Mid-Size Business Security: 4 Steps to Success

March 2, 2021

How SMBs Can Secure Endpoints and Remote Workers for the Long Haul

March 2, 2021

Upcoming Events

View all

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

November 1, 2021 - November 4, 2021

Videos and Fastchats

View all

FASTCHAT: How SOAR Eliminates Security Challenges and Elevates Service Provider Revenues

January 6, 2021

Happy Holidays from Channel Partners & Channel Futures!

December 21, 2020

FASTCHAT: How Old, Unpatched Technologies Are Creating New Security Threats for MSPs and Their Customers

December 3, 2020

Twitter

ChannelFutures

Our latest #Cybersecurity Roundup highlights #CPVirtual, @Huntresslabs, @Entrust_Corp and @InsightEnt.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 5, 2021
ChannelFutures

RT @Channel_Expo: A HUGE thank you to our amazing #CPVirtual sponsors and exhibitors! 👏 @ATTBusiness @DellTech @8x8 @lumentechco @telarus @…

March 5, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@okta acquiring rival @auth0 in $6.5 billion all-stock transaction. #security dlvr.it/Rtzwdp https://t.co/4LvHCJuwsR

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@MicrosoftTeams features are coming to @MSFTDynamics365, the company announced at @MS_Ignite. #MicrosoftIgnite… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@PreciselyData acquired by Clearlake Capital, @TAAssociates. #digitaltransformation dlvr.it/RtzbKg https://t.co/1rNYnTScxq

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

Thanks for attending #CPVirtual. Here's a Day 3 wrap and a look ahead to #CPExpo Homecoming in November!… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@Veeam announces six annual Impact Partner Awards, with @SHI_Intl, @LogicalisUS, more. #cloud… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

#XDR can improve operational efficiency for #MSPs. @TrendMicro #security #endpoint #AI #threatintelligence… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 4, 2021

MSSP Insider

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Channel Partners Online

Want more? Find more channel news and analysis on our sister site, Channel Partners.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Online
  • Channel Partners Events
  • MSP 501
  • MSSP Insider
  • IoT World Today
  • Webhostingtalk

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2021 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X