Specific details on the new Mitel channel program elements, and the distributors involved, will not be announced until April, but the strategic outline of both elements of the go-to-market strategy was made clear.
While Calabrio has been expanding its cloud presence with new partnerships with Contact Centre-as-a-Service providers, they are also leveraging their strategic platform and reseller partners and looking to expand into new kinds of platform markets.
Avaya also rebooted their chatbot strategy with a significant deepening of their AI focus, and they have some things coming in the near future that will be of interest to partners.
Avaya’s restructuring issues in 2017 had an impact in the midmarket in Canada which is served by the channel. Those problems have disappeared, and Avaya is bullish about its Canadian channel business moving forward.
Mercer Rowe, newly recruited from IBM’s cloud business to put Avaya on a cutting-edge path in the cloud, laid out his plans at the Avaya ENGAGE event this week
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.
