New Avaya channel chief Jon Brinton lays out Avaya’s channel strategy for the year ahead, which unsurprisingly emphasizes the new Avaya Cloud Office but also focuses on developing new channels.
While Avaya is putting more emphasis on the cloud, Network Telecom, whose customers are mainly in small town southwestern Ontario, won a Midmarket Partner of the Year award by leveraging a very traditional business model.
Avaya kicked off the first day of their big customer event by focusing on their partnership with RingCentral and how it fits into their overall vision. They also announced the Avaya Cloud Office UCaaS solution with RingCentral, which will be available later this quarter.
LumApps, which is aggressively expanding in North America and now sells more here than in Europe, has joined the Microsoft Partner eXperience program and plans to build out a strong Microsoft channel, as they have already done with Google.
These new devices, which support Zoom natively and will support more third-party apps in the future, offer users greater simplicity, and offer channel partners 3x the margins compared to selling a solution around a PC.
The revamped collaboration platform is a key part of LogMeIn’s strategy of unifying and harmonizing its UCC offerings.
Avaya sees the synergy between the two companies and IBM’s consultancy capabilities as important assets in meeting the unexpectedly high demand for ReadyNow as-a-service from larger customers.
Teamline is focused on the Microsoft platform, and MultiJoin won’t change that, but it does give users added flexibility with calls involving different platforms.
The offer to new customers for both Microsoft Teams and Surface Hub 2 is also intended to get some Pexip channel partners from the AV side of the house to work more closely with Microsoft.
Calabrio’s CEO talks with ChannelBuzz about what partners can expect to see from the newly enlarged company, which he says now has the largest channel business in the space.
Steelcase makes Steelcase Roam, a mobile cart and wall mounting system designed specifically for the Microsoft Surface Hub 2, and has launched a new program and new IT distribution relationships to help Microsoft partners sell it.
With the restructuring of Sennheiser into two separate business for the start of 2020 on schedule, the part of the company focused on unified communications has already implemented internal and channel sales changes.
The follow-up to last year’s original ThinkSmart Hub 500, which was for Skype for Business, continues Lenovo’s strategy of building out their Smart Office portfolio, and in the teams space in particular.
The SMB space was a hard sell for partners with virtualized Powered by IP Office, but the company thinks this next-gen rebranded play that runs on the Google cloud will be a popular partner offering.
netTALK, which has been in the consumer phone market for years, enters the commercial market, and is looking for both Master Agents and VARs to sell it.
The new Evolve 65e adds features like a Hear-Through feature and a Jabra Sound+ management capability.
The enhancements include ease-of-use things like flipping the media player from horizontal to vertical, so that it, and the text to speech and associated analytics, run top to bottom instead of side to side, like everything else in mobility.
The extension of Martello’s relationship with Mitel around Mitel Performance Analytics to include assets acquired from ShoreTel both strengthens that partnership and positions Martello well for aggressive growth on other fronts.
Poly is designed to provide a new joint identity for the Plantronics-Polycom combination. In addition to new pipeline product announced at Enterprise Connect this week, the company also emphasized new and expanded strategic partnerships which have more joint offerings on the way.
U.K.-based StarLeaf, which sells entirely through channel partners, has some in the U.S. and Canada, but is not well known in North America overall, and is hoping that this new device increases their exposure here.
