Westcon UCaaS Solution Makes Life Easier for Service Providers and IT Managers

By Christopher Mohr
Contributing Writer

Westcon recently launched a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution based on the Avaya (News - Alert) Office platform for resellers to offer to their customers. The turnkey solution will be hosted on TelAgility, which provides built-in compliance and taxation features for service providers. It is currently available in the U.S. and will be available in Canada in 2016.

Tarrytown, New York-based WestconGroup, Inc. is a distributor that offers UC, data center, cloud, and security solutions through a global reseller network. TelAgility is based in Annapolis, Maryland, and provides cloud platforms for UCaaS and VoIP to SMB and mid-market resellers.

With a turnkey UCaaS solution like Westcon’s, companies can avoid high installation and hardware costs, and have it up and running in a short time. One of the solution’s more compelling features is the built-in taxation and compliance support. Collecting sales tax is a challenging effort for any telecom for the simple reason that these taxes can vary so much between different jurisdictions they operate in.

These taxes are often not limited to sales or use taxes and can also include excise, gross receipts, and emergency services taxes. While telecoms can pass the cost of taxes on to customers in their bills, any taxes that weren’t collected but should have been are the telecom’s responsibility.

Westcon also promotes UCaaS on the basis that it causes a shift from a CaEx-oriented to OpExX-oriented IT expenditures. This gives CIOs more flexibility, because short-term budgets tend to have fewer requirements than their long-term counterparts, making it more likely that IT projects are approved. They can purchase capacity that scales up or down as needs require and avoid many lump sum payments that often accompany new IT solutions.

The combined Westcon-TelAgility UCaaS solution that runs on Avaya Office is a solution where resellers, service providers, and end-users come out ahead. Resellers have a solution backed by reputable vendors like Avaya and Westcon, which have a long track record of working together. Service providers have many of the complexities that come from collecting taxes taken care of for them, and it allows IT management a solution that they can fit into their ongoing budgets, without facing the obstacles that come with long-term expenditures.