BT Wholesale and Avaya Partner to Launch Cloud Solutions
BT and Avaya announced a five-year agreement for BT Wholesale to deliver Avaya's unified communications and contact center applications as a cloud service to midmarket and enterprise customers via the indirect channel.
Called Avaya Cloud Solutions, the service will give businesses and public sector organisations with 250 employees or more access to the full suite of Avaya Aura contact center and UC products delivered over BT Wholesale's managed Ethernet network. The service will be available only from Avaya-accredited channel partners through BT Wholesale. It will provide customers with adaptable communications applications, security, and service level guarantees that have previously only been available at an enterprise level.
The joint initiative also offers existing Avaya customers a hybrid model, with managed migration to help them evolve from on-site to cloud-based services. In making the move to a hosted environment, BT Wholesale and Avaya will help companies better manage costs by eliminating the need for large, up-front capital investments and upgrades.
"There are currently no wholesale options which allow the U.K. channel to address midmarket and enterprise customers with an end-to-end service. For most, their only realistic option until now has been to fund and build propositions themselves," said James Hennah, director of fixed telecoms at BT Wholesale, in a statement. "But with this agreement, channel partners can easily harness the combined strengths of BT Wholesale and Avaya without capital investment. Hosted communications services are at the heart of our plans to offer more to our indirect channel business. By working with us, channel partners can offer their business customers a complete and future-proofed communications service."
"With Avaya Cloud Solutions we are delivering a new path to greater business agility," said Joe Manuele, vice president of global SP-SI, alliances, and cloud at Avaya, in a statement. "New and existing customers can now access unified communications and contact center applications as a service with BT Wholesale through our channel partners, safe in the knowledge that the flexibility, scalability, and reliability that is synonymous with Avaya products is available in an even more affordable and manageable way."