Enterprise Connect Roundup: 8×8 Products, Avaya Cloud Program

8×8 unveiled several new products at this week’s Enterprise Connect 2019 conference, designed to improve the customer and employee experience, and make the contact center more efficient.

The new products include:

• An integration of 8×8 Contact Center with Google Cloud’s new Contact Center AI, with new key features including the 8×8 Virtual Agent and Agent Assist.
• An integration of Jitsi’s open-source video communications technology with 8×8’s X Series Meetings platform, designed to bridge the gap between personal and professional video technology.
• A quality management and speech-analytics solution that will span across all customer voice interactions to provide data for improved employee experience and workplace productivity.

John DeLozier, 8×8’s channel chief, and vice president of channel strategy, execution and marketing, tells Channel Partners that Google AI makes “our existing contact center solution more robust, efficient and effective.”

“It provides deeper touch points for partners to learn about their customer’s business, and an opportunity for additional consulting and professional-service engagements,” he said.

8×8’s John DeLozier

The new 8×8 Meetings creates new business opportunities for partners to sell into companies looking to bring a “great meetings experience that includes 8×8’s … voice and team messaging for the entire enterprise all in one desktop/mobile app,” DeLozier said.

“In the past, customers wanting truly best-in-class solutions might have paired 8×8 voice or contact center with a competing solution for video,” he said. “But those are generally fairly expensive; therefore, companies only let select employees get seats. Executives and conference rooms, for example, would get a video-only point solution, but the rest of the knowledge workers might get lesser video/web/audio conferencing seats. Now, they can get the full suite of best-in-class solutions from 8×8 as the single vendor. For partners, single vendor means deeper relationships, better knowledge and superior support, compared to when they need to cobble together solutions from multiple vendors.”

Quality management/speech analytics offers organizations deeper insights into their customers’ business, allowing them to provide more personalized engagements, DeLozier said.

“It’s a valuable tool for 8×8 partners looking to help their customers derive business value from their communications platform (uncover productivity insights, make better informed decisions and so on) rather than simply provide a forum for communication,” he said. “The solution transforms communication from being a simple utility to a strategic advantage and possible revenue driver.”

Also at Enterprise Connect, Avaya introduced a program to help businesses considering cloud-delivery models as part of their digital transformations. Avaya’s cloud-transformation program aims to make it easier, removing uncertainty and risk from the transition.

Avaya’s David Rollison

David Rollison, Avaya’s content marketing manager, tells Channel Partners his company provides “compelling” incentives and resources to support partners with the most effective and efficient ways to implement the company’s OneCloud solutions for public, private or hybrid customer deployments. More details about the program will be available in the coming months, he said.

“Avaya’s cloud-transformation program unites our flexible OneCloud platform with options available for any size of business: public, private and hybrid,” he said. “Very few cloud providers have this capability and it’s a key differentiator as partners work with their customers to determine the best cloud models for various applications, based on business needs. Partners will also gain a competitive advantage through delivery of customer benefits including: cost reduction [through] reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), reduced capital and scale leverage; improved performance [with] single automated delivery, global standards and multivendor support; and mitigated risk [with] faster deployments, always on current software release and full support.”