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Windstream Enterprise‘s OfficeSuite UC, its flagship UCaaS offering, surpassed 300,000 seats on the platform in the second quarter, representing 20 percent year-over-year growth.
The company attributes the growth in seats to rapid product development based on: user-community input deployed and built on 100 percent proprietary code; an intuitive portal with the ability to manage on any device; and secure infrastructure with everything stored in the cloud versus on a PBX system or handset.
Windstream channel chief Curt Allen tells Channel Partners the OfficeSuite UC success is in the context of Windstream’s end-to-end suite of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions.
Curt Allen
“Our position as the market leader in Avaya cloud along with OfficeSuite and our Mitel play delivers a suite of solutions to our partners that address the entire marketplace for our partners,” he said. “This recognition by partners has led to a significant uptick in opportunities in all of our UCaaS platforms, led by OfficeSuite. We are in the last couple weeks of our Channel Elevation tour, and this has been an emphasis at each stop.”
OfficeSuite UC features and hardware continue to expand and evolve as a “robust UC solution that can enable both SMB and distributed enterprise customers,” Allen said. The portal capabilities allow partners to quote, order and manage their customer’s services through a single interface, he said.
Windstream also is making investments in its partners by providing product certification to teach them how to use all the tools they have access to, he said.
The company is seeing renewed partner interest and activity since its acquisition of Broadview Networks, Allen added.
Partners can pursue deals pairing OfficeSuite and SD-WAN, offer a faster deployment model and more agile management capabilities, and consolidate communications services while reducing cost and management burden, Allen noted.
“Improving employee productivity and customer engagement are critical IT imperatives for most businesses,” said Joseph Harding, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Windstream Enterprise and Wholesale. “OfficeSuite is just one piece of our growing UCaaS portfolio we’re investing in to help businesses of all sizes make the transition to the cloud with solutions that deliver cost-effective, best-in-class customer and employee experiences.”