Avaya brings personalised cloud to the mid-market with BT Wholesale

Tailored UC and CC cloud solution combines resiliency and MiFID II / PCI compliance out of the box

Guildford, UK – 2017 – Avaya today announced the UK launch of ACS Select, the next generation of the Avaya Cloud Solutions delivery platform, which is hosted securely on the BT Wholesale network. The service enables mid-market organisations with legacy on-premise and complicated integrations of multi-vendor solutions to transform their customer experiences, and create the same personalised and tailored cloud experiences which have typically been the preserve of larger enterprises.

Available through BT Wholesale channel partners, ACS Select will empower their medium-sized customers, a market known for its cautious approach to migrating existing on-premise infrastructures to the cloud. They will now be able to collaborate and communicate on a par with larger enterprises and personalise their customer experience across voice, video, messaging and customer contact applications, all via a single platform. This innovative hybrid cloud service is an extension of the longstanding relationship between BT Wholesale and Avaya, which combines the strengths of BT’s ultrafast high-performance Ethernet network and Avaya’s market-leading IP Office Cloud and Avaya Contact Centre Select solutions.

Building upon the strong Unified Communications (UC) team engagement and Contact Centre (CC) customer engagement foundations offered by Avaya Cloud Solutions, ACS Select offers further functionality, carrier grade resilience ‘out-of-the-box’, and business continuity options to improve and tailor the customer experience. It also includes managed service options to support channel partners’ go-to-market strategies, including a managed network which extends the SLA out to the customer site.

Intelligent call recording – which is vital for financial services and many other industries - will be included to ensure customers can demonstrate recording compliance with financial industry standards and directives, including the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID). Secure Payments ensures compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Growing enterprises need technology that can be configured to suit increasingly complex requirements unique to each company. With ACS Select, organisations which have tailored their on-premise platforms over time into totally unique environments can emulate that personalisation in the cloud. Flexible service options enable the configuration of customers’ platforms to their own specific hybrid or fully on-premise requirements.

In the hosted environment, BT Wholesale and Avaya will help companies better manage costs by eliminating the need for large, up-front capital investments and upgrades. The ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model will enable businesses to respond quickly and flexibly to their customer demands and improve both customer experience and revenue generation. Avaya and BT Wholesale have created an end-to-end service that is resilient, guaranteed and highly secure, whilst giving customers the flexibility to create, configure and control tailored architectures through their preferred channel partner.

Ioan MacRae, UK Managing Director at Avaya, said:

“The introduction of ACS Select reflects the strategic importance we place on our alliance and partner ecosystem. We have a long and successful relationship with BT Wholesale, and with them we are helping both partners and customers understand the importance of how services integrate for a successful cloud migration, especially from a resilience, security and regulatory compliance standpoint.

“ACS Select is not a mass-market, one size fits all offering that restricts performance capabilities or lumbers companies with functionality that is of no use to them. Our reseller partners can offer it as a bespoke solution to fit to their mid-sized customers’ existing systems and applications, along with the economies of scale and speed to market enabled by the combined reach and market share of two of the most trusted brands in communications.”

Simon Orme, Director of Sales at BT Wholesale, said:

“We have gained a tremendous amount of insight from customers over the years when selling Avaya Cloud Solutions. Building on that strong foundation, Avaya and BT Wholesale have designed ACS Select to solve the issues which we know companies are facing when it comes to configuring a solution that will deliver a consistent end-to-end service. For example, there are lots of companies running a cloud communications environment across multiple sites, with some at completely different stages in their cloud migration journey than others. The scalable and highly customisable nature of the platform meets the needs of very fast-moving and ever-changing organisations, who want their employees to experience an identical level of service across every site.”

The service is designed especially for scalability. Customers can choose from a capacity of up to 3,000 seats for UC and up to 400 seats for CC, and will only be charged based on their use, meaning they can manage costs and scale up or down as they require.