New Avaya CEO Jim Chirico acknowledged the old Avaya was the equivalent of a team that loses football games by playing a prevent defense, and told the company’s customers and partners that now they have a fundamentally different gameplan.
Avaya was already partnered with Spoken, but the acquisition will allow broaden application of their technology throughout Avaya’s portfolio, to enable customers to transform their business models.
Nectar creates a new Chief Revenue Officer position to coordinate the company’s different channel routes to market.
This extension of the Avaya-Salesforce relationship provides a complete omni-channel integration between the customer engagement and CRM platforms. The companies plan to develop the relationship further, into areas like the Internet of Things.
Cisco previews Spark Assistant, which aims to bring voice control to its collaboration tools, and ultimately create a AI-based meeting moderator.
Educating customers – and partners – about pure play and hybrid cloud options is a critical part of the Avaya strategy.
HeadSetup Pro Manager provides the ability to roll out updates globally, as well as full asset management and configuration management capabilities. It can also scale to manage up to a million devices.
Avaya Equinox Meetings Online is a rebranded and significantly upgraded updating of Avaya Live Video. It is a service which integrates well with on-prem video, and is aimed at the premium part of the market where video quality matters.
The best-of-breed partnership is aimed at enterprises with a global presence, as well as regional customers with significant challenges.
Following Rejean Bourgault’s departure for AWS Canada, Avaya names a replacement from within, hoping for some stability in the Canadian country manager role.
The deal reg discount comes bundled with a permanent spiff for completion of a registered deal, and Sennheiser says that some interesting new products in the new year will add to the program’s value.
The Ingram Micro deal is part of a significant initiative 8×8 has been making this year to up its investment in the channel.
Because the closing of the acquisition will take place during a planned extensive restructuring of the Mitel channel program, the integration of both programs into a new one will take place in relatively short order.
The plan is to rationalize and simplify the portfolio, although there is no rush to settle on a common platform. There is also relatively little channel overlap, so no need to rationalize the number of partners.
Mitel’s acquisition of the Toshiba business is all about acquiring customers, and their channel. In order to protect their own Mitel channel partners, the two channels will, however, remain separate.
Sennheiser adds a distributor with focus on the communications space, after trimming its distribution channel by about half a year ago.
Avaya Canada channel chief Corey Mindel discusses partner momentum selling Avaya’s software-based next-gen products, including Zang, which can be a tricky issue for some partners.
Mutare is one of about 90 strategic ISV partners of Zang, but they were also one of the very first.
Carl Watene of Jive Canada on the company’s partnering strategy, and why MSPs should be giving UCaaS a second look.
Walter Denk, who has a distribution background and has been working for Avaya in Germany, is the company’s new global channel chief. Even more importantly, he says that the job has been redefined and that the channel will benefit.
