The RingCentral-Avaya announcement from last week had a lot of industry watchers scratching their heads. The benefits to RingCentral were clear: They just bought an exclusive position for their UC offering with the world’s largest reseller ecosystem. But what is Avaya’s main benefit? Obviously, the cash component was a key to it. (Although I don’t fully understand the inner-workings of that cash-crunch.) But was hobbling their UC business too high a price to pay?
I think the real benefit here is that the deal frees Avaya to focus fully on its crown jewel, the contact center business. A Mitel merger, or any merger for that matter, was going to add confusion in that area. All the moves in the last few years make sense if you think of it in terms of clearing away distractions from a focus on contact center.
This post was supposed to be about the “Top Contact Center Acquisitions of 2018”, but two significant deals occurred in the last two weeks, and I didn’t want to wait another year to include them on the list. Plus, we already published 
