A Non-disruptive Calling Solution for the Hybrid Workforce: Hybrid Calling

Many organizations are hoping to move from a traditional, premise-based telephony solution to a cloud-based unified communications or UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) solution.

With an objective of avoiding any unnecessary disruption, these organizations will frequently wish to migrate some users to a UCaaS environment while maintaining legacy telephone systems to support other users. This is commonly referred to as a Hybrid calling solution, and that’s a term that we have adopted at Continuant. Hybrid calling is frequently used to support a hybrid workforce (employees in the office, employees at home, etc.).

In a recent issue of Channel Futures, new Avaya CEO Alan Masarek, essentially, makes his pitch for a hybrid solution, and I think it’s a good pitch … with one exception.

From Masarek:

“So first of all, we have a history in selling premises-based solutions, our mid-market product, IP Office; our UC product for enterprise, Aura; and our CC product, Elite. We’re unique out there. Where most competitors are all cloud, there are big swaths of customers for which premises makes a great deal of sense. So, think about certain geographies in the world; we cover 190 countries. Think about verticals — health care, critical care, hospitals — and even within geographies or segments, you have governments frequently, or rural areas without great connectivity, things like that, where that premises architecture is critical to them. Then we have companies that want to go immediately to full public multi-tenancy cloud. The beauty is most are somewhere in between. Most are sitting there in some sort of hybrid path, particularly when you think of these very large customers that are really the bread and butter of Avaya’s customer base. And we have effectively 90% share among large enterprises, governmental agencies, and such globally. So, in that world, we can provide a very unique offering, which we call innovation without disruption.”

What’s the one exception?

While some companies do choose to migrate legacy Avaya solutions to Avaya’s UCaaS solution, we find that most are more interested in solutions that are “Leaders” in Gartner’s magic quadrant – solutions from companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom.

As a Microsoft Global Partner of the Year for Teams Calling, we can expertly help customers create a hybrid calling solution utilizing a combination of legacy, premise-based systems and Microsoft Teams Calling. For many, that’s an even better pitch!