Avaya OneCloud Rebrand Flexes Cloud, Subscription-Based Services Focus

‘By simplifying the positioning … we can target more value-based selling and more complete outcome-based solutions, which is what customers want. They don’t want tactical features, they want solutions to real problems,’ Simon Harrison, Avaya’s chief marketing officer, tells CRN.

Unified communications giant Avaya is rebranding its entire communications portfolio under the Avaya OneCloud name, another signal to the market that Avaya is putting all its muscle behind the cloud.

The Avaya OneCloud portfolio now encapsulates the firm‘s contact center, unified communications, collaboration and Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) offerings. Each offering can be deployed from the cloud, as can Avaya’s managed services and its private and public cloud offerings, said Simon Harrison, Avaya’s chief marketing officer.

“We want to ensure Avaya is recognized as being able to deliver the most comprehensive, powerful cloud portfolio in the market,” Harrison told CRN. ”By simplifying the positioning … we can target more value-based selling and more complete outcome-based solutions, which is what customers want. They don’t want tactical features, they want solutions to real problems.”

[Related: Avaya CEO Jim Chirico: Partners Leading Charge On 'Record-High' Subscriptions Sales]

Since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2017, Avaya, once an equipment-focused provider, has shifted its business to a cloud-based business model. The company in January said it was ending sales of its Powered By Avaya IP Office for partners and customers as the company put its energy behind its cloud-based UC offering, Avaya Cloud Office. Prior to that, partners were selling the virtualized and containerized versions of Powered By Avaya IP Office to emulate a cloud UC offering from Avaya. Avaya Cloud Office now lives under the Avaya OneCloud UCaaS umbrella.

“Avaya OneCloud is a powerful, highly focused proof point showing our transformation to a cloud-based SaaS company,” Harrison said.

In addition to Avaya OneCloud UCaaS, the portfolio includes Avaya OneCloud CCaaS and Avaya OneCloud CPaaS. Avaya partners selling CPaaS can use the platform to develop their own applications or build on top of offerings that Avaya has already developed, the company said.

For the channel, the portfolio rebrand will “dramatically” simplify how Avaya partners connect customers with products. The alignment will help improve sales conversations and the delivery of Avaya solutions and packaged offerings from the channel, Harrison said.

Avaya OneCloud also will help partners expand their services in areas such as migration, modernization analytics and customer journey mapping consulting, he added.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company‘s focus on software, cloud and subscription-based solutions is paying off. Avaya CEO Jim Chirico told CRN in May after its second-quarter 2020 earnings call that about 75 percent of the company‘s subscription revenue has been partner-led. Subscription revenue during Avaya’s second quarter climbed to 88 percent of Avaya’s total revenue, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic spurring demand for cloud-based communications services, the company said.

Harrison said that Avaya is seeing “especially high demand” for Avaya OneCloud subscriptions, something that customers can buy through partners.

Avaya has enabled more than 2.5 million employees to work remotely for more than 11,000 companies since the start of the shutdown caused by the pandemic in February, Harrison said.

Avaya does about 80 percent of its business though the channel today.