Avaya Takes Wraps Off Custom Managed Communications Service

Avaya is pulling the covers off a new custom managed communications offering aimed at the enterprise space and available through its channel partners.

Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions provides custom managed voice and communications services to enterprise-size and larger companies that have aging infrastructure and either don’t want to replace or deal with the hassle of replacing and/or managing their communications infrastructure, said Ed Nalbandian, VP of Operations Services at Avaya.

“There are two types of enterprises we typically work with,” he said, “the first being enterprises that have an aging communications infrastructure and want to transform to a next-generation [platform] but don’t know how to get there. For them, we are able to offer a full OpEx offering that includes product, implementation and managed services in single per-unit price. The second type is those [enterprises] with an aging infrastructure that are not quite ready to transform their aging technology and want to have a vendor run their communications better than they can themselves.”

For the first group of customers, Avaya offers the full gamut of Avaya communications technology, starting with its Aura communications platform and including its Flare Experience unified communications technology. Installation, management and monitoring of the infrastructure can be done either by Avaya or its channel partner, Nalbandian said.

The second group of customers can be serviced via Avaya’s new $15 million Matrix cloud-based communications management platform, which offers support for multivendor environments. “We’re seeing a lot of companies with multiple vendors in their environments, which typically is difficult for MSPs and other service providers to manage,” Nalbandian said. “The fact that we offer this multivendor support is a key differentiator in our offering.”

While Avaya has a complete set of managed services offering, Nalbandian emphasized Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions is a separate service and completely custom, from the hardware to the SLAs. “We don’t have a standard set of pricing and options for this service — we sit down with the customer and the partner and build a solution based on specific requirements of how they want us to support them,” he said.

As a result, both customers and partners have a say in how deep Avaya will engage, he said.

“It often comes down to the end customer, and typically the more involved the partner is the more the customer wants [the service] and the more the value is there,” Nalbandian said. “It’s a big deal to outsource voice, and customers need to feel comfortable from a cost and performance standpoint.”