Monday Morning Impact – October 14

RingCentral to Provide UCaaS Solutions for Avaya

RingCentral, a Belmont, California-based provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), announced an alliance in which it will become the exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions to Avaya. The two companies plan to jointly develop programs to leverage Avaya’s sales and partner network, as well as build a new solution called, “Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral.” The alliance is also intended to help Avaya’s customer base transition to the cloud.

“This strategic partnership leverages the respective strengths of Avaya and RingCentral to provide a definitive differentiated solution,” said Vlad Shmunis, Founder, Chairman and CEO, RingCentral. “We are excited to bring RingCentral’s leading UCaaS platform to Avaya’s installed base of over 100 million users and over 4,700 partners, providing long-term growth opportunities for both our companies.”

Under the commercial agreement, both companies will contribute resources towards development and sales & marketing of Avaya Cloud Office. RingCentral will pay Avaya an advance of $375 million, predominantly for future commissions, as well as certain licensing rights. RingCentral will also purchase $125 million aggregate principal amount of 3% convertible and redeemable preferred stock, obtaining approximately a 6% position in Avaya on an as-converted basis.

“This also gives us the opportunity to unlock value from a largely unmonetized base of our business as it brings compelling value to our customers and partners,” said Jim Chirico, President and CEO of Avaya. “We believe this highly complementary partnership is a game changer that expands the total addressable market for Avaya and creates meaningful value for both Avaya and RingCentral.”

This agreement, which apparently does not require shareholder vote of either company, is subject to customary regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in Q4 2019. The Board of Directors of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction.

Channel Impact^®
This collaboration is expected to enable Avaya’s customers to leverage their existing investments while drastically reducing migration complexities and timeframes. Avaya Cloud Office is expected to provide an attractive total cost of ownership for Avaya customers and favorable compensation for Avaya and its partners.

WatchGuard Launches New Service to Resolve Security Gap

WatchGuard Technologies, a Seattle-based network security company, has announced the release of DNSWatchGO, a new cloud-based security service that automatically detects and blocks phishing attacks, command and control callbacks and data exfiltration attempts against users both inside and outside the network perimeter.

Available as a stand-alone solution and through Passport, the company’s security services bundle, the new service offers DNS-level protection and content filtering as well as automated end-user security awareness and education features that are designed to help prevent future security incidents.

“As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, businesses need to be able to protect against the increasing attacks that take place outside of their core network. They need to be able to monitor off-network traffic, filter access to malicious and unwanted content, and protect users even when they’re not using a VPN,” said Andrew Young, SVP of product management at WatchGuard. “DNSWatchGO was built to deliver these capabilities and extend our industry-leading layered protections to secure remote workers beyond the network perimeter, while also educating and training them on security best practices in the process.”

The solution extends the DNS-level protection and content filtering provided by WatchGuard’s existing DNSWatch service to monitor and correlate outbound DNS requests from off-network users against an aggregated list of malicious domains. All endpoint attempts to connect with known malicious infrastructure are blocked, users are redirected and the traffic is routed to DNSWatch servers for further investigation and malware removal.

The service also provides automated phishing protection and education to end-users users in real-time. When employees click on an email or link that the platform has identified as a phishing attempt, they are immediately redirected to resources that provide education about phishing attacks and best practices for prevention. Additionally, the solution provides clear analyses for each blocked attack, which are delivered to IT administrators and MSPs for context and internal action.

Channel Impact^®
The service brings off-network content filtering to user-based security stacks. This combined with the education component, can be a useful supplement to security postures.

Arcserve and Sophos Announce a Strategic Security Alliance

Arcserve, LLC, a Minnesota-based data protection provider, has announced a global alliance with Sophos to provide dedicated cyberthreat protection for backed up data. Through this collaboration, organizations can integrate anti-ransomware and other threat prevention technologies, such as deep learning AI for both known and unknown malware, and award-winning disaster recovery and high availability capabilities for prevention against data loss.

The joint solution will be delivered via Arcserve’s appliance series, which are self-contained appliances for disaster recovery, based on Arcserve’s Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution that combines flash-accelerated deduplicated storage, server processing, networking, and cloud services.

Arcserve appliances will integrate Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Server, which provides endpoint protection with artificial intelligence.

“Increasingly cybercriminals are targeting backup systems as a way to increase the odds that compromised businesses will make a ransom payment,” said Francois Depayras, Sophos’ vice president of OEM sales and alliances. “Having dedicated protection from both malware and the latest exploits ensures the backup data will stand strong against the most advanced threats.”

Channel Impact^®
Together, the new solution delivers a multi-layered approach to prevent, protect, and immunize backup data from cyberattacks.