Image Gallery: Avaya Engage Featuring RingCentral

AVAYA ENGAGE — It’s sunny outside in downtown Phoenix, but it’s been quite “cloudy” at this week’s Avaya Engage 2020 conference.

The theme of this year’s conference is “All In” and it highlighted Avaya’s increasing focus on cloud unified communications (UC). It also was the first Engage for Jon Brinton, a longtime Mitel exec who joined Avaya in December as its vice president of North America channel sales.

Avaya’s Jon Brinton

“We put significant resources behind our partners to sell with the channel, to enable them and to help them be successful,” he said. “We have some very lucrative programs where we engage with our channel and they can take advantage of compensation and benefits that go to our strategic imperatives. So we want them to clearly get the message that we’re all in with our channel, and I’m asking them to be all in with Avaya. So we’ve got a very clear and what I think would be a successful intent going forward with our channel.”

On March 31, Avaya and RingCentral will launch Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, the UC offering based on the strategic partnership between the two companies announced last October. Avaya Cloud Office combines RingCentral’s UCaaS platform with Avaya phones, services and migration capabilities for businesses of all sizes.

In addition to traditional channel partners, Avaya is pursuing master agents and agents to sell the new offering.

Frank Ciccone, Avaya’s senior vice president and general manager of North America sales and service delivery, said his company is transforming to become more cloud and subscription-oriented, and its Edge partner program now reflects that compensation model.

“The partners quickly realized that for them there are a fair amount of financial reasons why they want to move to subscription, and they’re jumping on it,” he said.

Scroll through our gallery below for highlights from the conference.