Yesterday I landed in Phoenix, AZ, geared up for Avaya's annual unified communications conference, ENGAGE 2020. As I suspected when I set out to cover the event, this year would be dominated by the new UCaaS offering (Avaya Cloud Office) RingCentral and Avaya announced in October 2019.
The all-in-one cloud solution for voice, messaging, meetings, video conferencing, and collaboration is on show at ENGAGE, and I am elated to bring you more details about the much-anticipated UCaaS solution I predict will shake up the market, at least from the taste I got at ENGAGE 2020.
Avaya's new Cloud Office UCaaS solution combines RingCentral’s industry-leading unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform with Avaya telephones, services, and migration abilities, creating a robust UCaaS tool that will deliver cloud services and advanced collaboration functions.
Since October, there's been a lot of speculation as to what the deal might include, and now we finally have some more details. So, without further ado, here's everything I learned about Avaya Cloud Office powered by RingCentral which will be made generally available in the spring of 2020.
Unpacking Avaya Cloud Office
Avaya Cloud Office is an all-in-one call, team messaging, video conferencing, file sharing and collaboration UCaaS platform. It is device agnostic and comes with over 200 pre-built RingCentral-developed business solution integrations like Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Google's G Suite.
The public cloud solution is poised to eliminate the need for separate meeting services, as it will include unlimited video conferencing with up to 500 participants, a real game-changer if you ask me. For audio meetings, Avaya Cloud Office will enable up to 1,000 participants and let users share screens/files, etc. Business text and MMS are also possibilities with the new solution.
In terms of device compatibility, Avaya said its Cloud Office solution will work with its J139, J169, and J179 series phones, adding, it has plans add more as devices as it fine-tunes the solution. When it comes to customer support, one of the many perks of UCaaS, the solution will be managed by Avaya’s customer success team.
