UC Transition to Cloud Supported by Avaya

Two professional service offerings have been unveiled by Avaya. They are called Cloud Transformation Services and Continuous Performance Services, and one supports customers in transitioning their unified communications (UC) strategies to the cloud.

Avaya’s own group of around 1,500 “specialists” will perform the new services, and partners will be able to provide other Avaya sales. It will also still be possible for partners to provide these new services on their other Avaya sales, according to the vice president of Avaya Professional Services Strategy and Business Development, Ajay Kapoor.

Kapoor said: “[Services] are delivered by Avaya Professional Services; however, our partners frequently use this as a value-add on top of what they are offering already.” He added that discounts on Avaya services (based on volume sold) will also be offered to partners.

Smaller solution providers will benefit in particular from these sales, because they do not have adequate resources to stand up a professional services arm of their own. Kapoor noted: “Where [partners] don't have the skill or footprint, we become an extension of them.”

Cloud Transformation Services is a set of services targeted at cloud service providers and enterprise customers moving their Avaya communications systems to a hosted environment. Services like cost-benefit analysis of different cloud delivery models, financial modeling, evaluating a business' collaboration technologies and designing architectures for cloud-based communications will be provided for the enterprise by Avaya.

Cloud service providers will receive end-to-end guidance from Avaya, and this will be aimed at distributing a hosting strategy which ranges from architectural designs to the testing stage.

Continuous Performance Services make sure that an organization's network and communications applications work as well as possible. A unique, subscription-based model is provided by Avaya through these services, and customers will gain prescribed consulting engagements on an annual, quarterly or monthly basis.

Avaya's Continuous Performance Services seeks to assist customers in making the most of their technology investments, according to Kapoor, but this cannot always be guaranteed or taken advantage of through traditional maintenance contracts.

Kapoor said: “We're finding that clients are purchasing technology and then there are multiple decisions they need to make, whether it's a maintenance contract, a managed services contract, or both of those. The client needs to get the most of their asset. But we've found across a number of clients that, especially with communications, ... they are purchasing the asset, they get the first round of benefits and then it falls flat after that.”

There are four areas of focus for Avaya's Continuous Performance Services, and these include security assurance, self-service application tuning, SIP economic consulting and network visualization. The services will be released over time, according to Kapoor. (CY) Link