Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 30 | Page 19

ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY Click to watch ENABLING business agility and continuity Fadi Moubarak, Vice President – Channels, Avaya The new normal requires organisations to use tools that increase agility and enable Business Continuity – and an evolution to cloud technology is an integral part of this approach. Fadi Moubarak, Vice President – Channels, Avaya, tells Intelligent Tech Channels’ Rebecca Miles how Avaya is making the transformation to a cloud and SaaS focused company and talks us through what this means for the company’s channel strategy and channel partners. AAvaya has been making a transformation to a cloud and SaaS focused company. Why is this important for Avaya and its customers, particularly in the new normal? When looking at the move to the cloud, we start with the customer – that’s always the start and end point of any decision or trend. If you step back and look at the economic or micro or macro environment, usually around the world, you see customers have had to deal with a lot of changes and a very dynamic environment over the past few years, even before COVID-19. There are always sudden changes, whether economic pressures or opportunities in certain sectors, so we see customers having to change the way they work almost every six months for one reason or another. This is where the power of the cloud or OpEx general model comes in because it gives the customer a certain level of agility. We realised we needed to offer agility to our customers. Firstly, if they adopt a certain solution it doesn’t take a long time to implement – they can turn it on and consume. And secondly, sometimes they’ll need to consume a certain technology for a period of time and then shift the use for something else. And again, in cloud that is possible. With the CapEx environment investment, by the time the solution is up and running, the need is gone. We realised we needed to offer agility to our customers. At the same time, we also realised that the needs of our customers are not always standard. Even in the same industry, in the same country, you see banks or financial institutions, or governments or service INTELLIGENT INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS TECH CHANNELS Issue XX 30 19