Best of Breed versus Best of Suite UCaaS Solutions with Avaya Cloud Office
Every month, we partner with leading solutions providers in the IT industry to help our clients, and IT professionals across industries, understand the solutions available to them. On May 11, we spoke with Avaya about their Cloud Office offering and how they’re helping companies move from on-premise phone systems and integrate leading solutions like RingCentral and Microsoft Teams.
Here are some of our favorite (and most informative) excerpts from the webinar transcript. For more information, and a demo of the Avaya Cloud Office system, you can watch the full webinar at the end of this post!
How Cloud phone systems Reduced Total Cost of Ownership during COVID-19
The best way to share with you what I think is the biggest benefit of moving to a cloud office solution can best be told through a customer story. Back in June of 2020, I met with a longtime Avaya customer, our account team dutifully prepared me for the meeting, they let me know this customer is using an Avaya phone system. When the pandemic started in February, they reached out and they took advantage of our temporary licensing offer at the time to help move their workers from the office to the safety of their homes. The whole reason for this meeting was that the licensing was coming up on expiration, the CTO had a couple of questions they wanted to ask, and then they were ready to place an order. So we jumped on the bridge, and right from the get go, I could tell this meeting was going to be memorable. The CTO shared with us a very sobering reality, since the pandemic had started they had recognized no meaningful revenues. So we’re talking months, with no revenue, and they had to make hard decisions as a result.
Fast forward to June, the economic realities hadn't improved and they were staring down the barrel of even more painful decisions. So before they made those decisions, the CEO asked all of their business leaders to shake the trees, dig through their couches, and look through budgets to find any spare change.
So we asked, what does the rest of your collaboration stack look like? How do your people meet virtually, how do you message and collaborate? And this customer was not unlike most that we work with. Over the years, they had built a multi-vendor, best of breed, monolithic solution. And in the past, you went out and you built best of breed solutions, because the apps that you would buy from a single vendor in a bundled approach had some feature loss. When you need a messaging service, you treat it as a separate app to be evaluated and to be procured. So I encouraged them to change their thinking from best of breed to best of suite. Because when you move to cloud, a lot of these things that you used to buy as apps have become features. And the interesting thing is the mindset that started the best of breed approach. In the UCaaS space when you move to a bundled approach, there is very little, if any, feature loss but there is a ton of cost benefit that you can find and when we did the math, we found that just by moving to a cloud-based service like Avaya Cloud Office, that would help this IT leader offset its headcount. This led the CTO to ask “What am I potentially paying twice for in my stack? And how do I justify the duplicated expense?”
Why use a subscription cloud solution when a one-time fee software does the same thing?
Moving to a cloud-based service with a monthly recurring fee, it will be the same charge from now until the end of the end of time. Back when I was a customer, I used to do the same type of math, I used to do return on investment math. I looked at a cloud-based service, and I looked at a software-based service, in my head, I would say there's some time over the next three to five years, that magical moment, where spending the money now will save me the money then.
The reality is, with cloud-based services, the total cost of ownership is almost always lower than buying and building your own service. And there's a great way to visualize this. Imagine taking your requirements, the number of users that you have, the devices that your users need. If you get a proposal for a software company, and you get a proposal from a cloud company, well, what they're proposing to implement is essentially the iceberg. And the quote is the part of the ice that's above the surface. And they look a lot like each one of them will include a per user line item. On the software side, it's a license, on the cloud side, it's a subscription. Both of them include the devices, headsets, cameras, desk phones that people need. And both of them will include some implementation fees. When you sign on the dotted line for either proposal, this is the moment you get in the water. When you sign on the line for the software side, this is the moment you realize you might have made a mistake.
Because the ice is really, really deep. There are a lot of things that are not on a software-based proposal that you need, starting with somewhere to actually host the application. So you're talking about data center hosting, rental, power, cooling backup, batteries and generator, you need somewhere to run the application. Then you're talking about compute storage and network hardware, software, virtualization licensing - you need the connectivity to talk to the outside world. Then you're talking about carrier services, PRI SIP trunks and such - you need network access so your users can get to the application in your data center. Then you wrap all of that, with maintenance contracts and with the human cost of keeping everything operational. Even if you've done all of these things, you've created a single point of failure. If you want to make this application highly available and global, you need to replicate all that multiple times. The ice is really, really deep, and it costs a lot to operate your own infrastructure.
Now over on the cloud side, when you get in the water, you're going to realize the ice is really shallow. Sure, you need internet access so your users can get to the cloud. But that's about it. Everything else that you need is above the surface in that per user subscription. Which means not only is the total cost of ownership lower, but you also gain predictability. You know what your communication costs are going to be on a user by user basis and it scales with your organization.
There's also another key benefit included in that subscription and that's upgrades. It gets you out of the annual running of the Hunger Games - no longer are you fighting for upgrade dollars to keep your existing communications infrastructure. When you buy a brand new car, the first day is the best day, you drive it off the lot, take a mental snapshot, because it only goes downhill from there, the new car smell fades, kids leave wrappers and toys all over the car. The first day is the best day. Cloud services, however, are the exact opposite. The first day is the worst day. With solutions like Avaya Cloud Office, they're only going to get better over time, because of the innovation that's included with your solution.
Why use Avaya Cloud Office when I can purchase best of breed software, like RingCentral, individually?
We have a jointly developed solution, that's a first of its kind, in Avaya Cloud Office with RingCentral. This is a solution that brought together two industry leaders to give you something unique. When you choose Avaya Cloud Office, you get more features, you get twice the R&D, and you get it at the same price as if you bought RingCentral service or any other cloud communication service by itself. RingCentral’s platform is highly scalable and highly available. They have not had to pay a penalty fee in years, this means the system is only unavailable for no more than a couple of minutes per year. Most of their industry competitors are operating on hours of downtime per year.
We're also bringing over the most popular features from our on premise phone systems that make these devices so useful. This means when you're coming from an on premise system to a Avaya Cloud Office solution, you get the disruptive benefits without the disruption to your business. You're not relearning how call flows work and migration is key - we help make sure that your go lives are smooth as silk. We have migration toolkits that our client success team will use to extract data from your existing gear and upload into the cloud. And then after go live, you contact our concierge team with any issues and we will troubleshoot for you. If it needs escalation to our partners at RingCentral, we do that on your behalf, and we don't wait in line either. We have our own dedicated team at RingCentral which means your tickets will get faster escalation, more visibility, and they'll just be closed faster.
Can a UCaaS solution troubleshoot as efficiently as we can on-premise?
This is one of the biggest fears that people have in moving to a cloud based service. Because over the years, we've drilled the need for managed networks and quality of service in private networking links like MPLS in order to deliver good quality audio. Now we're pushing this over the public Internet, what happens when something goes wrong? With Avaya cloud office, we include a time machine in the form of analytics. Everything is measured. So when somebody reports a bad experience, either audio or video, you can start to investigate if it’s the device, the operating system installed, what type of network connection was in use, who was the carrier, how much processor was being utilized, how much memory was allocated, all of those things. So this way, you can find the needle in the haystack. And just like the management interface, the analytics portal is also embedded into your mobile apps.
Do we have to get rid of the apps we do like to adopt a full UCaaS solution like Avaya Cloud Office?
We integrate with almost every major application on the market today. So if you're using Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Zoho for your CRM, we've got them all. If you're using Office 365, or Google Workspace, we integrate with it for one click to join meetings, and contact synchronization. We also synchronize with non-communications apps like Dropbox and Trello for project management. And the number one requested integration comes from Microsoft Teams. With Avaya Cloud Office for Microsoft Teams, we don't force you to move away from your Teams environment, we just make Teams work better. And we do it all at a lower price than buying a Microsoft calling plan for Teams.
Want to learn more about Avaya Cloud Office UCaaS solution? Watch the full webinar and demo below and contact us today, we’d be happy to coordinate an introduction and quotes at no cost.
