UC, Contact Center and Video Solutions from Avaya Cloud
UC, Contact Center and Video Solutions from Avaya Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
Unified communications-as-a-service, contact center-as-a-service, and video-as-a-service offerings are being offered by Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based Avaya, who has enhanced its Collaborate Cloud portfolio of hosted services.
Avaya first introduced its Collaborative Cloud brand cloud strategy around a year ago, and is focused largely on AvayaLive, a suite of public cloud-delivered communications services aimed at the SMB space. However, with this latest move, it appears that Avaya and its channel are ready to place themselves in a leading role within the cloud-based communications sphere, according to the director of product management at Avaya Cloud Solutions, Bruce MacVarish.
MacVarish stated: “So, last year, we kind of laid out the game plan, laid out the road map, said, ‘Here's where we want to go. The good news is that ... these announcements are directly on that path.’”
Aura is the core architecture and basis for Avaya’s new cloud-based UC, contact center and video solutions. Avaya’s Customer Experience Management suite is the focal point of the contact center solutions, and this also is provided with the UC-as-a-service piece on a single Aura architecture.
The Radvision platform is the basis of Avaya’s video-as-a-service, which the latter purchased a year ago. The full suite of features will be distributed in Avaya’s Elite Series MCUs, Scopia Mobile and Scopia Desktop offerings.
A managed private cloud offering, Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions Express, is also being unveiled by the company; it will be useful for contact centers which host 500 or fewer concurrent agents, and will be distributed as part of Avaya’s managed services business.
Systems integrators and cloud service providers will mainly host the UC-, contact center-, and video-as-a-service solutions. The director of Business Development for Avaya’s Cloud Solutions, Jitender Singh, stated that solutions can be resold by Avaya solution providers from larger service providers, or can possibly be hosted by themselves.
Singh said: “A large service provider can host an Avaya cloud in their data center and provide all the resources for managing it and offering it, offering it as a white-label service. Smaller, traditional solution providers ... they would be able to leverage this wholesale cloud from one of our larger partners and resell it, rebrand it or co-brand it. Each set of partner will have a different role to play.”
Those service providers which host Avaya’s cloud will find the utility-based pricing model advantageous, particularly as it will let them pay for customer usage simultaneously. Singh added that the model is different when compared to competitors of Avaya, the majority of whom request that service providers pay up front to host their solutions, and who have no consideration of monthly customer usage.
Singh commented: “From a business model perspective, we are really trying to lower that barrier of entry or risk for partners as they try to turn to this nascent market. Most of our competitors, the way they handle cloud is shifting that entire risk to the partner. In our case, it’s a pay-as-you-sell model, so we only charge the partner for what actually they sell on a month-to-month basis. So we are sharing that risk and the rewards with the partners.”
Avaya’s new cloud-based UC, contact center and voice solutions will compete with others like Cisco and ShoreTel, who are also key UC players. (CY) Link