Avaya hits back at ‘no cloud’ claims

Avaya has hit back at claims it is losing partners to its rivals because of a lack of cloud offering. 

Last month rival Genesys claimed it is luring Avaya and Alcatel partners away with its cloud portfolio. 

However, Avaya maintains it does have cloud options, pointing to the recent UK rollout of its enterprise private cloud offering, ReadyNow. 

“There was comment [by Genesys] that we don’t have a cloud solution, and this represents a major opportunity for them. We absolutely do have a cloud proposition, which is a platform to enable digital transformation,” Alison Hastings, Avaya’s UK channel leader, tells Microscope. 

“We launched it to our existing channels a couple of weeks ago and every single one has been trained, on-boarded, and we are already building major funnel.” 

Hastings says the company is identifying new prospective partners, which are coming to Avaya directly, “as they are recognising that they need us to enhance their go-to-market. All round, we’re delighted with the response.” 

She adds: “From a channel perspective…we’re not forcing them; it’s not a one-step approach. That’s where I feel we will get stronger in the channel, because we’re flexible, agile and it’s all about integration.” 

Since speaking with Microscope, Avaya has made several announcements regarding its product portfolio, not least that RingCentral will be now delivering a new joint UCaaS solution called Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) after a $500m investment in the firm. 

It also announced a new Contact Center as a Service platform, Avaya IX-CC, scheduled for launch in the first half of 2020. Avaya describes as being “built from the ground up as a cloud-based solution developed on a microservices architecture.” 

“While continuing to offer our customers their choice of deployment options, we expect our enterprise customers to shift from an on-premise deployment paradigm to a private or public cloud architecture over the next two to three years. Avaya IX-CC has been designed to meet that expectation and help Avaya maintain its leadership position in the Contact Center business,” Rick Hawkes, sales engineering manager at Avaya, tells Microscope.