May's UC EXPO 2018 was the chance for all of the main collaboration and communication brands to showcase their presence in the industry and none were more prominent than Avaya. With arguably the biggest and most impressive stand on the show floor we take a look the event from an Avaya angle.
During the two day UC EXPO event one of the busiest stands on the show floor was undoubtedly Avaya's. With a host of exciting new technology proposals on show Avaya were joined, on their stand, by two of their most innovative partners with Formation Tech and Six Degrees Group offering customers a direct partner route to Avaya's cloud offerings.
UC Today spoke to Managing Director of Avaya UK Ioan MacRae about UC EXPO and how events such as this provide Avaya with a great opportunity.
“Strategically UC EXPO is an important show for us. We went with the goal to drive our mid-market portfolio in the form of our new endpoint devices, our pure cloud and hybrid cloud solutions as well as the latest version of Equinox. We did just that, and furthermore, we had a lot of positive discussions about Oceana for our enterprise customers, proving that Avaya has a lot to gain from attending.”
Avaya have been public about their strategic shift to enable a more cloud focused proposition and this was highlighted by their choice of partners. Both Formation Tech and Six Degrees are both cloud centric Avaya partners with specialist skills that enable existing, and new, Avaya customers to leverage some of the huge realm of benefits that cloud platforms represent.
Mark Tyers Co-Founder of Formation was enthused by the opportunity to work so closely alongside Avaya at such a high profile event.
"The aspect I found most interesting, whilst on the (Avaya) stand, was the realisation of the size of the existing Avaya customer base. Within the Avaya' customers the opportunity for cloud is huge, much bigger than in any other business. The ease of which customers can now to look to move to cloud solutions generated enormous interest for us."
As well as leveraging a huge base of existing Avaya customers, many of whom will be considering upgrading legacy on premises systems to Avaya's latest generation of cloud options, Formation's other Co-Founder Dan Cholerton recognises the benefits they can add as partner to Avaya's proposition at events like UC EXPO.
