UPDATE - Avaya Announces Partner Award Winners at

LAS VEGAS, NV --(Marketwired - February 15, 2017) - Avaya ENGAGE - Avaya has recognized five U.S partners for outstanding support, contribution and commitment to innovation at its Avaya ENGAGE event, currently underway at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

The Partner awards are the first accolades to be presented at the five-day event and celebrate leaders across five categories, including: Innovation, Networking, Midmarket, Cloud and Service; as well as an overall award for Partner of the Year.

The following winners were announced during the ENGAGE ceremony:

• Innovation Partner of the Year: IPC

IPC brings together a financial community of more than 6,000, combining industry expertise and comprehensive technology to help clients anticipate change and solve problems with innovative solutions through nationwide deployments in multivendor environments. As an Avaya partner, IPC has been instrumental in the development, beta testing and positioning of Avaya's SDN Fx Solution for Healthcare. Furthermore, IPC is a leader in the development of innovative customized applications around Aura, Engagement Solutions, Breeze, Private Cloud deployment and Avaya Networking.

• Networking Partner of the Year: Alliance Technology Group

As an Avaya partner, Alliance Technology Group built the staging facility to accelerate installation at the Air National Guard for Avaya's largest networking deal. The company is extremely proficient in unified communications and continues to sell to the strength of Avaya's networking portfolio from a technology perspective, while also delivering double-digit year over year growth in networking sales.

• Midmarket Partner of the Year: STL Communications

STL Communications provides customers with complete communication system management and monitoring services. As an Avaya partner, STL uses the powered by Avaya model to provide both voice and networking as managed service offerings; it also tailors these solutions to specific customer needs as part of a long term customer relationship strategy. In FY16, STL transformed its Total Voice Offer which increased sales of the popular midmarket-solution, IP Office, via a managed services offer.

• Cloud Partner of the Year: Windstream

Windstream Communications provides voice and data network communications and managed services to businesses across the U.S.; it's also responsible for residential broadband, phone and digital TV services for more than 8.1 million consumers across 21 states. As an Avaya Partner, Windstream has been a pioneer in the UC/CC-as-a-service market, with its first Powered-by-Avaya xCaaS (Aura) solution established in 2013. The company has been integral in migrating customers to Windstream/Avaya Cloud solutions and has a strong reputation for accelerating delivery of contact center solutions to meet customers' fast-paced and rapidly changing business needs.

• Service Partner of the Year: ConvergeOne

ConvergeOne is a single-source provider for IT needs; from phone systems and computer networks, to hardware and application development. As an Avaya partner, ConvergeOne has demonstrated best-in-class growth in services, including a maintenance services renewal rate of 80 per cent, call center growth of 30 percent and product spend growth of more than 14 percent year over year. It's also led the roll out C1 Cloud Powered by Avaya.

• Overall Partner of the Year: ConvergeOne

ConvergeOne also receives the accolade for Overall Partner of the Year, recognizing its outstanding revenue growth in 2016 in Product, Maintenance and APS in all sectors. Further to its aforementioned achievements, ConvergeOne is also lauded as Avaya's top growth performance rebate partner and the leading virtual infrastructure business partner, selling more than 20 Pod Fx platforms in Avaya in 2016.

"As an Avaya partner, ConvergeOne has demonstrated best-in-class growth in services with superb renewal rates, excellent customer retention and delivery metrics that demonstrate their absolute customer focus," said Gary Levy, Vice President of U.S. Channels, Avaya. "Not only have they grown their Avaya Networking business five times over since 2015, but they have also been integral in several large strategic Breeze wins for Avaya in 2016."

Levy continued, "Hats off to all of our partners who join us this week to participate in Avaya ENGAGE, and special congratulations to our award winners for their commitment to customers and passion to drive results. Our partners are an important part to Avaya's success, and it's with great honor to recognize this year's winners."

About Avaya Avaya enables the mission critical, real-time communication applications of the world's most important operations. As the global leader in delivering superior communications experiences, Avaya provides the most complete portfolio of software and services for contact center and unified communications with integrated, secure networking-offered on premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Today's digital world requires some form of communications enablement, and no other company is better positioned to do this than Avaya. For more information please visit www.avaya.com .

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