There has been a lot of discussion this week about Avaya’s Partnership with RingCentral

The original headline read something like this:

Avaya Announces Strategic Partnership with RingCentral to Accelerate Transformation to the Cloud

Through this strategic partnership, Avaya will introduce Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, a new, global Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution. RingCentral is contributing $500 million to its partnership with Avaya

Avaya’s View –

We (Avaya) are integrating the existing Avaya Cloud features with RingCentral Cloud This will allow existing Avaya devices to be used on the RingCentral Cloud amongst other benefits.   It Accelerates the company’s execution of its growth strategy and transformation to the cloud.

RingCentral View –

By gaining access to the significant Avaya user base, particularly in the US, RingCentral will look to migrate these users to the Cloud using their existing end points.

Our view – There is a fair bit of cross over between IPOffice and Ring Central, so moving from an IP Office to RingCentral will be formulated so that users who chose option this will be moving to Avaya Cloud rather than Ring Central Cloud.   So far indications show that the Avaya Partner will retain the relationship which is key to users who appreciate the benefits that long term partner management brings.

The larger Avaya users and actually the majority of our user Avaya base  – Financial, Contact Centres etc. – aren’t the core target for this and we don’t anticipate this type of organisation wanting to move all their comms into a solution based on a public cloud – Avaya’s Private Cloud offer might be an option if larger users are set on a cloud offering which competes directly with this.

Overall there is lots of speculation as key will be the pricing which we are not due to see until the new year.

Overall then:

Avaya are getting $500 million up front and ongoing revenue and RingCentral get the cache of working with the leader in the market.   The detail of the opportunity for customers will come out in the pricing in early 2020.