Avaya Debuts Cloud Communications, Collaboration Consulting Services

Avaya is pushing ahead with its own cloud computing strategy by launching new consulting services meant to accelerate the adoption of communications and advanced collaboration tools in the cloud. Avaya’s new Cloud Transformation Services came into being at least in part because of Avaya research that found that close to half (47 percent) of Avaya customers are investigating or deploying unified communications and collaboration (UCC) in the cloud.

That is quite the indication that a lot of businesses, even at the enterprise level, are tired of forking out the capital to maintain expensive and complicated UCC infrastructure. Instead, they’re increasingly looking to cloud services providers to solve their UCC problems and enable them to focus on their core competencies.

“What is interesting is we wanted some validation from our customer base,” Sanjeev Gupta, vice president in the Avaya Professional Services group, told Talkin’ Cloud. As he explained, Avaya believed there was a growing trend toward adopting cloud-based UCC, and if the results are to be believed (there’s no reason to think any other way), the trend has exploded. And it’s safe to say those numbers will continue to increase over the next few years.

Avaya’s Cloud Transformation Services were developed to assist organizations in defining and implementing a cloud communications strategy that supports individual business objectives. Think of it as templating with a lot of customizability. But there is a twofold strategy at work here—consulting services and implementation services.

Although consulting services will mostly be delivered directly by Avaya to customers, the networking communications company will be relying in part on channel partners for implementation services. Compared to Avaya’s traditional go-to-market strategy, little has changed. In time, though, Avaya will probably work with partners to resell its consulting services.

Specific to service providers, Avaya is rolling out architectural and implementation services.

“The expansion comes from two fronts. First, we’re just launching a UC-as-a-service product offering and associated consulting offerings. We want to expand beyond that, too,” Gupta said.