Avaya promises 'aggressive stance' for 2020 at partner event

Comms vendor outlines plans for next year at partner event in Dubai

Avaya has outlined how it plans to help partners break into new markets and build a cloud strategy at its channel event in Dubai.

Strategies for Avaya's 2020 financial year were unveiled at the Avaya Partner Summit, where the company is hosting the EMEA and APAC region's leading channel executives.

At the summit, Avaya demonstrated the strong growth opportunities with detailed sessions on the solutions that are driving cloud growth, including Avaya IX Subscription programme, Avaya OneCloud ReadyNow, Avaya CPaaS, and Avaya IX Spaces.

The event also served as the launch of Avaya's latest customer experience applications, Avaya IX Onespace, and other solutions - all of which are being rolled out globally, Avaya said.

Fadi Moubarak, vice president of Avaya's international channel business, said: "Our message to partners this year is to embrace the new - new solutions, new customers, and new deployment models.

We've demonstrated our commitment to this idea with an impressive number of solutions, offerings and programmes, all of which will drive compelling opportunities for partners in the coming financial year.

"Nowhere is this more obvious than in the announcements we're making around cloud and the subscription-based model. This is where the industry is moving, and with programmes like Avaya IX Subscription, we're enabling our channel partners to support our joint customers at every stage of their cloud journey."

Among others, the Avaya Partner Summit included deep dives into the following solutions and programmes:

• Avaya IX Subscription, which offers a flexible new consumption-based alternative to traditional perpetual pricing models, and helps partners facilitate a transition to cloud for their customers.
• Avaya IX Spaces, a cloud-based collaboration solution that delivers audio and videoconferencing, file sharing and more through a lightweight web app, and promises to take the fight to a number of competitors that are both more expensive and less feature rich. Avaya IX Spaces is now available in 45 countries across the EMEA and APAC regions.
• Avaya OneCloud ReadyNow, which gives enterprise customers access to Avaya unified communications and contact centre solutions delivered in a secure private cloud environment, providing enterprises with a convenient and automated path to the benefits of cloud communications.
• Avaya communications platform as a service, which enables organisations to build apps with ease and integrate them into any application, workflow, or communications system.
• Avaya device as a service, which enables businesses to acquire Avaya's latest smart devices with the flexibility of a monthly subscription rather than an upfront purchase. Following a successful introduction in the US in 2018, this offering is now available to customers in a number of European countries.

"Partners will see us take a much more aggressive stance with our approach to innovation and opportunity this year, and we'll be encouraging and supporting them to join us as we take the prevailing market forces around digital transformation head on," Moubarak added.

"Between our new cloud offerings, vertical-specific solution sets, and advanced Contact Centre and unified communications applications, we have a compelling story to take to our joint customers as CX and EX leaders that will drive amazing business outcomes."

Avaya also said there are opportunities for partners to move existing customers to new use cases, with the latest updates to Avaya IX Contact Center, IX Workplace, and the range of IX Devices, which can be optioned as open SIP.