Recently, RingCentral announced that they will become the exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions to Avaya . They also announced plans to introduce a new solution: Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (ACO). What does this mean? There will be some confusion in the marketplace until this all settles down, but in the meantime, I’ve summarized my thoughts on why the partnership was formed and what it means to customers, VARs and sales agents. WHY DID THE PARTNERSHIP FORM? Avaya’s attempts at creating a multi-tenant cloud solution were not successful since their solution was simply to put a PBX in a colocation and call it cloud. It was not scalable or profitable, and Avaya’s investors wanted an exit. The partnership benefits Avaya because it gives them a revenue stream that would have evaporated otherwise. The partnership benefits RingCentral because they gain access to 100 million endpoints, which could double their valuation if only two percent of their customers conver...