Who you gonna call? Avaya grabs $500m investment from RingCentral to cut whopping debts

Beleaguered telecoms maker Avaya has formed a partnership with relative minnow RingCentral whereby it will become the exclusive supplier of the latter's unified-comms-as-a-service (UCaaS) and get a chunk of investment. A tie or joint venture between Avaya and the videoconferencing outfit was mooted last month. Avaya had been …

[DaveTheRave]

Too little too late

Avaya are toast.

[SIP My Drink]

But... But... But...

Ayava are the number 2 PBX maker in the world... How...

Yes more people are going hosted but this is nuts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But... But... But...

It's not nuts, its been a trend for 7+ years.

Take a look at your PBX systems and compare calls logs to those provided for mobile billing - unless you run a call centre-type function, the majority of the calls will be mobile and probably by a significant quantity.

[c1ue]

This is confusing to me. RingCentral is doing reasonably well, but this deal seems like they're plowing all their cash and a lot of their stock valuation into Avaya.

I guess it makes sense if RingCentral is basically buying Avaya's customer list, but this looks like a guppy swallowing a whale: RingCentral is giving $500M to Avaya when their annual revenue is $800M. The stock part makes more sense - it is way up,

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Avaya – which already sells unified comms and call-centre-as-a-service – will integrate RingCentral's UCaaS into its Cloud Office from Q1 2020

And then Microsoft can buy the whole lot and rename it Skype for BusinessOffice

[steviebuk]

Avaya

The company that likes to keep your phone/user name logins database on the Avaya servers that any consultant setups up, in plain text (not the consultants fault, its Avaya's shitty software). So all you have to do is steal the database and you have access to everyone's Avaya user name and password logins. The user names and passwords that 99% of people end up using for their AD logins, so you now have compromised their AD account as well.

Oh and go with a full PC/Laptop client only and forbid desk phones and you have "Sorry I know you're dying but I need to login to Windows first before I can call 999. Oh...sorry...hold on...I now can't remember my password. Oh, sorry, you're fucked now as I've locked my account so now can't call 999 for you".

And "Why did I take ages to answer your call? Because I couldn't answer the fucking thing until I logged in. And by the time I put my long password/passphase in, you rang off".