Khalid Khan, Avaya’s director cloud and midmarket, Middle East, Africa, South Europe and APAC, shares insights on the firm’s release 11 updates to its flagship IP Office solution.
Communications continues to be a critical aspect for the success of any business. As the methods and ways evolve to a more multifaceted structure, organisations are seeking simplified communication systems to stay connected with internal and external stakeholders.
Avaya’s IP Office solutions have enabled customers to create seamless engagement experiences cutting through limitations created by geographies and types of devices.
With its latest release 11 updates to IP Office, customers now have access to more advanced features enhancing business efficiencies such as the new unified communications platform Equinox.
Khalid Khan, director cloud and midmarket, Middle East, Africa, South Europe and APAC, says, “Equinox has been available on our large enterprise platform on Aura for the last couple of years. It is now coming to IP Office, which is a major step forward for the solution.”
This means organisations of any size can leverage the advantages of Aura through Equinox.
“This is appealing not only for end customers but also partners who cater to small and mid-size firms. They require simple solutions that can be deployed within a few hours. This is what we’re offering in the new release of IP Office even though it is equipped with advanced features,” Khan explains.
Existing customers of Avaya’s UC bundle can take advantage of the new features simply by upgrading their solution without having the need to invest again.
Khan adds, “From partners’ point of view, this is also a way for them to upgrade their customers to the latest updates as well as leverage cross and up selling opportunities. We will have knowledge transfer sessions available for partners for the new updates although we have designed everything to be quite simple.”
Besides Equinox, Avaya has also announced Chronicall for IP Office, which is OEM’d from Xima.
Avaya Chronicall for Avaya IP Office provides over 50 standard reports that support visual call management, customisable displays and agent performance, and is available in both on-premises and Partner Powered by Avaya cloud deployments.
“This is for smaller organisations with simpler problems. Often, companies have sought a call center like application without needing the full-fledged features. This could be because of their size or their needs are very simple. We are now offering a solution, which can be used not only for call centre-like environments but also for general users. We have seen a market demand where general users too want to know the telephonic activity of their employees,” he says.
Cloud has been an important part of Avaya’s growth story. Partners will soon be able to sell instances to customers as small as five to 10 users. Private cloud is a high-end solution usually bought by large enterprise customers.
“Our solution offers the opportunity to be sold in multi-instances and this proved to be affordable and competitive when organisation sizes were about 50 or above 100 users. However, it became very expensive for those customers who had five to ten users as they had to buy it as a separate instance.”
In release 11, Avaya is now launching multi-tenancy version of IP Office.
Khan adds, “This way we can deliver to smaller customers and also our larger customers depending on their use cases. This also enables cost saving for our partners who are setting up in the SME segment. We are doing multi-tenancy in the new and modern way.”
IP Office 11 also supports the Avaya Vantage for voice and video and the company’s newest J Series desktop phones, in addition to the Avaya Equinox client.
Khan expects partners to be most excited about Equinox, IP Office cloud multi-tenancy feature and Avaya Xima updates.
“For partners, these updates are high-impacting and most interesting with tremendous channel opportunities,” he says.
