Advcomsol.com | Industry Update 7/28/2026
Avaya Is Stepping Back From Cloud Office
If you’re running Avaya Cloud Office (ACO), or you’re an Avaya customer weighing a move to the cloud, pay attention to what just came out of RingCentral’s latest earnings call. During the quarter ended June 30, 2026, RingCentral and Avaya amended their strategic partnership. The headline: existing ACO customers and partners are being transitioned off the Avaya-branded offering and onto the direct RingCentral EX platform. RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis called it a “win-win,” and the deal reportedly netted RingCentral a $15 million gain while releasing Avaya from certain contractual obligations tied to the joint product.
To be clear, this isn’t a clean divorce. RingCentral will still retain Avaya’s exclusive multi-tenant cloud customers, so the underlying commercial relationship survives. What’s changing is who Avaya ACO customers actually deal with. Support, branding, and the go-forward relationship move to RingCentral exclusively. Avaya, meanwhile, is visibly reorienting around its enterprise-focused portfolio of Aura, Infinity, and Nexus rather than the multi-tenant cloud phone product it co-branded with RingCentral.
Why This Should Matter to Current Avaya Customers
For a solution that reportedly reached 420,000 businesses at its peak, this is a meaningful shift — and it raises a few legitimate questions if you’re on ACO today or considering it.
1. Accountability Shifts When Brands Change Hands
When a product you bought under the Avaya name gets folded into another company’s brand and support organization, the vendor relationship you signed up for isn’t the one you’ll have going forward. That typically means new terms, a new support structure to learn, and a period where it’s unclear who owns which part of the experience. If knowing exactly who to call when something breaks is important to your business, dedicated Avaya phone system support is worth understanding before you’re mid-transition and looking for answers.
2. Avaya’s Roadmap Is Moving Away From Multi-Tenant Cloud
Avaya stepping back from its own branded cloud UC offering — while doubling down on Aura, Infinity, and Nexus — sends a clear signal about where the company sees its future, and it isn’t in multi-tenant cloud telephony under its own name. If you bought into ACO expecting Avaya to be the long-term steward of that product, that assumption no longer holds. For businesses weighing what comes next, an Avaya phone system upgrade path that keeps you on Avaya infrastructure — without depending on a co-branded cloud product — may be the more stable direction.
3. This Pattern Has Happened Before
Avaya emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, a process that wiped out RingCentral’s $125 million equity stake in the partnership. This latest restructuring follows a broader pattern in which RingCentral has unwound or restructured similar exclusive UCaaS arrangements with other legacy PBX vendors, including Mitel and Atos/Unify. If you want a deeper look at how UCaaS vendor relationships work and what to watch for, our Ultimate Guide to UCaaS is a good place to start. Vendor-branded cloud phone systems built on top of legacy on-premises manufacturers have not had a great track record for stability, and customers who bet on those brand names have had to migrate, re-contract, or renegotiate more than once.
None of this means ACO stops working tomorrow. But if you’re a business that depends on predictable telephony, a clear support chain, and a vendor whose roadmap you can actually plan around, this is the moment to ask hard questions about where your communications platform is headed.
How ACS’s Hosted Avaya Solution Removes the Uncertainty
This is exactly the gap ACS (Advanced Communication Systems) exists to close. As an authorized Avaya business partner, we work directly with businesses running Avaya IP Office and related Avaya platforms — not as a reseller of someone else’s rebranded cloud product, but as the single point of accountability for your Avaya voice and communications environment.
Our hosted Avaya cloud solution is built to protect the investment you’ve already made. Rather than a forced rip-and-replace, we help you move to a hosted, cloud-delivered model on your own timeline. This preserves the Avaya functionality your teams already know while eliminating dependence on a third party’s branding decisions or bankruptcy risk. You get one vendor, one support relationship, and one team that designed, implemented, and stands behind your system. With ACS, you are not a customer base being reassigned mid-contract because of a restructuring announcement on someone else’s earnings call.
For businesses currently on ACO watching this transition unfold — or for any Avaya customer wondering whether their cloud strategy is still in good hands — now is a reasonable time to get a second opinion. ACS can assess your current environment, walk through what the ACO-to-RingCentral transition actually means for your contract and support, and lay out a secure, hosted path that keeps your Avaya investment intact without the uncertainty.
Get a free quote or call us at 866-521-4571.
Sources
RingCentral Announces NiCE Will Resell RingEX, Restructures Avaya Partnership — CX Foundation, July 24, 2026
RingCentral Announces Extended and Expanded Strategic Partnership Agreement with Avaya
Avaya and RingCentral Expand Strategic Partnership with AI-Powered Communications and Collaboration Experiences — Avaya Newsroom
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