BT and Avaya Offer Cloud Solutions Channel

BT and Avaya are joining forces, with the announcement of a five-year agreement for BT Wholesale to deliver Avaya's Unified Communications and Contact Center applications as a cloud service to midmarket and enterprise customers.

The Avaya Cloud Solutions service will provide a full suite of Avaya Aura contact center and UC services to businesses and organizations with more than 250 employees. These services will be delivered via BT Wholesale's managed Ethernet network, and will be available from Avaya accredited channel partners through BT.

In addition, the companies aim to provide current Avaya customers with a hybrid model with managed migration, in order to help them move from on-site to cloud-based services. The companies hope to remove the need for up-front capital investments and upgrades by offering a pay-as-you-grow business model.

Of course, both BT and Avaya are benefitting from this agreement, as each company's reach and market share will prove advantageous to the other. But the hope is that they will be able to provide customers with innovative commercial deals, with varying prices and services according to individual needs.

"As all business communication applications move from premise-based hardware and software to hosted cloud-based services, the market is moving from independent VARs and Solution Integrators to the big, trusted communication service providers like BT and their channels partners," said UCStrategies' Art Rosenberg. "So it is a very logical move for Avaya to provide its cloud-based communication applications for reselling as a service to end user organizations. Since large service providers control consumer wireless network access and support for a variety of mobile endpoint devices, they are in an excellent position to facilitate mobile BYOD needs for all types of business end users, whether for internal staff, business partners, or consumer customers."

"The wave of the future is cloud services, mobile apps, and flexible, UC-enabled communications with people, anywhere, any time, any way," he added. "So Avaya's move is certainly a step in the right direction to facilitate the migration away from legacy voice-only PSTN telephony. Avaya has some catching up to do with some of its OTT competitors that have started exploiting clouds and WebRTC for mobile apps, but maybe 'He who laughs last, laughs best!'"

For more information, visit www.btplc.com and www.avaya.com.