Avaya CEO and president Jim Chirico took time out of his results call to praise the outfit’s channel.
Chirico said that revenues from its Cloud, Alliance Partner and Subscription growth engines had more than doubled from the same period last year and now accounted for 34 percent of total revenue.
Those numbers, for the three months ended 31 December 2020, showed a four percent climb in revenues to $743 million.
Chirico said that key to his optimism was the progress that Avaya has made with some of its hosted products, with the firm’s OnceCloud offering and its call-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) offering picking up steam in the UK.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the adoption of collaboration tools and has got many firms thinking about the future, but even before those changes began, Avaya had been transforming its business and taking its channel with it.
There was some caution across the channel about the “master agent” model, an approach that has been more popular in the US and more common in the comms channel.
However, the company is certain that partners had started to appreciate where the model worked.
The shift to a SaaS model has come at a time when the customer base is changing its attitudes towards the cloud. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of hosted services and forced even the most conservative of customers to be open-minded, Chirico said.
