Avaya has launched a new device-as-a-service (DaaS) offering that will allow businesses to buy the company’s latest smart desktop devices on a monthly subscription basis.

It also unveiled expanded cloud communications offerings for contact center as a service (CCaaS) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) via a new storefront allowing “simple online purchase and fulfillment.” The store includes contact center and UC bundles, smart desktop devices and other collaboration and workforce optimization offerings, designed to make it easy for SMB and midmarket organizations to learn, shop, buy and manage cloud solutions and services.

Avaya’s Steve Brock

Steve Brock, director of Avaya desktop experience marketing, tells Channel Partners that DaaS is “absolutely huge for our partners.” DaaS is being introduced in the United States with international expansion to follow, he said.

“We worked directly with our tier 1 and tier 2 partners to really put this together over several months and make sure it’s a win-win-win,” he said. “What this means to our partners is they can now take the latest technology, the latest devices, and offer it to their customers at a very low monthly subscription price. So it lowers the risk, increases the accessibility and increases the affordability for every customer. So instead of having to relegate themselves to a generic free phone as part of their cloud offer or on-premise[s] deployment, they can now access the latest technology and put the latest technology into the hands of their employees.”

Avaya’s DaaS delivers the Avaya Vantage portfolio, the complete J100 series portfolio of IP phones, and the Avaya B109, B179 and B189 conferencing devices. These devices can be deployed on Avaya or non-Avaya UC platforms.

Customers can contract with terms of one, three or five years, with longer terms offering lower monthly prices. Customers can upgrade at any time to more advanced devices without any penalty.

DaaS makes Avaya’s device portfolio more attractive to partners’ customers, especially when customers may be considering upgrading their existing devices, Brock said.

“There’s the question of ,’Well, my device seems to work fine, so why do I want to upgrade?'” he said. “What this means is price is much less of a barrier … and it’s low risk because they can cancel at anytime. They can make changes, they can add devices and they can upgrade to different devices. So it gives them complete flexibility and it’s just a whole new, powerful offering for our partners.”

As for the CCaaS and UCaaS offerings via storefront, Avaya will leverage its master sales agent program as one of the primary routes to market for the customer segments. Within the new site, the agents will have access to tools to support their customers in the sales process, along with enablement tools for both this channel and their customers.

The experience is “seamless from easy quote management, order placement and rapid deployment,” according to Avaya. This new experience is also designed to enable more offers to be added quickly and seamlessly in the future, it said.

“Avaya is a leader with this first-time offering of both CCaaS and UCaaS solutions through an online store that makes it easy to ‘swipe and buy’ exactly what customers need, when they need it,” said Gaurav Passi, president of the Avaya Cloud business group. “This latest development in our evolution as a cloud communications company continues to expand our cloud offerings, and unlock significant value for customers and partners of all sizes.”

The storefront experience is available now in the United States and will expanding globally beginning early in 2019.