Back in 2017 former telephony giant Avaya (AVYA) declared bankruptcy. Since then there has been a number of attempts to break up the firm. Extreme bought the Avaya network division in 2017. In 2019 there were rumors that Mitel was going to attempt a leveraged buyout of Avaya.
Eventually, Avaya made a deal with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) vendor RingCentral (RNG) to save its bacon. With the deal, RingCentral will pay Avaya $500M and will be Avaya’s exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions. The two firms announced the “strategic partnership” in October 2019.
It’s February 2020 and the Avaya – RingCentral collaboration will start to show some results – next quarter. The beleaguered vendor announced at its Avaya Engage love-fest that beginning March 31, that in the U.S. the unimaginatively named Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (ACO) will be identical in features to the product RingCentral sells today. The rest of the world will have to wait – because RingCentral UCaaS is only available in seven countries.
It is reported that a few additional Avaya features will creep into the offering through 2020. The first two are targeted for release this summer are bridged appearance, and call park and page. Bridged appearance lets two desk phones maintain separate and shared lines, a feature typically used between assistants and their bosses. With call park and page, when a person places a call on hold, the system will automatically send a page to another department or user to pick up the call. The feature is particularly useful to retailers.
Towards the end of 2020 or later, the vendor expects to deliver features that include line appearance, call appearance, hotdesking, and support for the venerable Avaya Audix voicemail service.
Initially, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral will only work with three models of Avaya’s J series desk phones: 139, 169, and 179. Avaya will work with RingCentral to certify B series conference room phones, L series headsets and the CU360 video conferencing system. However, most IP Office customers are likely using older devices, given that Avaya launched the J series only one year ago.
Avaya is also developing software to automate the process of migrating settings and users from its legacy gear to the cloud, although that tool won’t be available until later in 2020.
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No Jitter points out that faced with the threat of its large installed base that goes back to legacy Nortel platforms, dumping Avaya – Avaya needed to do something.
To me this looks more like a win for RingCentral. For a relatively small investment ($500M on a market capitalization of $10.5B), RingCentral becomes the preferred UCaaS provider for the large Avaya installed base (100M+ seats) likely planning on a move to the cloud. Meanwhile, Avaya picks up a fully developed UCaaS to sell – if it can execute. Which has been its problem all along.
Can Avaya hold on long enough to develop the promised automation tools move complicated things like CMS to a cloud interface? – we will see.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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