Avaya and HP have announced a multi-year agreement to offer cloud-based unified communications and contact center technology, and management solutions for enterprises.
“This is far more than just a partnership agreement,” said Joe Manuele, VP SI/SP alliances and Global Cloud, at Avaya. “This is a huge step forward.”
Avaya previously had a global reseller agreement with HP, and was OEMing their Contact center-as-a-service offering. Now, the companies will sell a combined portfolio of Unified Communications-as-a-Service, Contact Center-as-a-Service, and infrastructure modernization services.
“The agreement also outsources some of our folks to HP, to accelerate our cloud market momentum,” Manuele said. The deal will see the HP Enterprise Services Business Process Services organization assume service delivery of a significant portion of Avaya Private Cloud Services, and that will involve a limited transfer of APCS employees and contractors to HP ES. Sales contracts, service level agreements, and overall client experience will, however, remain with Avaya.
“This agreement reinforces HP’s commitment to the mobility and workplace market and helps to grow HP’s presence in the end-user space,” said Mike Nefkens, EVP and General Manager, HP Enterprise Services. “The partnership with Avaya supports HP’s larger vision for the New Style of IT.”
Avaya gets several things from the deal, including a product refresh of the over 60,000 HP sales agents on Avaya equipment. From a strategic perspective, however, the big gain is that HP ES will greatly amplify the reach of Avaya Private Cloud Services.
“We are greatly expanding the reach of Avaya Cloud Services with this,” Manuele said. “That business will scale globally. HP is offering unified communications-as-a-service in 26 countries and HP will make available unified communications as-a-service and contact center-as-a-service on Helion available to Avaya partners. That is available through a select group of partners today, and we will expand that.”
Not all of Avaya’s nor HP services have been available in the Canadian market in the past, but Manuele said that’s not the case here.
“In Canada, we are working on a couple very large deals related to this,” he said. “There are very substantial customer opportunities for this in Canada
Avaya sees this agreement as a critical step in Avaya’s transformation to a software and services company.
“The market trend of customers from CAPEX to OPEX, with the PBX and other hardware systems that we sell shifting to software, is happening much faster than we originally anticipated,” Manuele said. “It has accelerated our shift to OPEX and the cloud.”
