Jim Chirico kicked off Avaya’s Engage event in Austin by updating the company’s progress, and stressing that the company has reoriented its approach to the market and their customers.
Comm100, which has been in business since 2009, just formalized its first partner program in September, and has onboarded four new partners, with many more in the pipeline. They are looking to build the channel business to 20 per cent within the next 1-2 years.
Jabra’s first corded model in their next-gen Engage franchise is aimed at the more price-sensitive part of the market, but still contains some interesting technology innovations.
Sennheiser is looking to their first unified communication and collaboration headset to further stimulate their Canadian business, which has already been showing strong momentum.
The Engage franchise, available in models which connect to two and five devices respectively, and in mono, stereo and lightweight convertible models, is designed for dense contact centre environments, and allows for connection of three times as many wireless headsets with no loss of quality.
The new technology will roll out later this year in a new service, Avaya Mobile Experience, although Canadians will have to wait a little longer, since it will initially be limited to the U.S.
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 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.
Last year, IR introduced a network assessment and testing tool. It is being well received by Microsoft partners, and the new version is switching from software to a cloud-based tool.
The best-of-breed partnership is aimed at enterprises with a global presence, as well as regional customers with significant challenges.
The Ingram Micro deal is part of a significant initiative 8×8 has been making this year to up its investment in the channel.
Mutare is one of about 90 strategic ISV partners of Zang, but they were also one of the very first.
Avaya says that the sale of its Contact Center business is not being considered as a way to restructure its balance sheet, but that it is in discussions to possibly sell off other assets.
The changes will save partners hours in deployment time, and by reducing time to value, should also please customers.
8×8 only began to actively a develop a channel in recent years, but now the channel has grown to the point where the company has had to introduce a new program with more resources to support it.
Cloud-focused contact centre software vendor Five9 continues its channel expansion by signing its first distribution deal, a global one with Westcon-Comstor. Westcon will help Five9 build out its solution provider channel
