More than 300 Trusted Advisors, key vendors and members of the AVANT leadership were on hand for the February 27th ribbon-cutting of AVANT Communications’ 6,000 square foot “HQ-2” in Dallas, Texas. The million-dollar, 18-month initiative underscores our company’s commitment to enabling technology sales all over North America and beyond.
“AVANT Communications launched in Chicago more than ten years ago, and we’ve led the league in enabling Trusted Advisors to support their clients in IT decision making,” said AVANT CEO Ian Kieninger. “As our industry footprint continues to grow larger, it only makes sense that we extend our presence into new regions, to more capably meet the needs of our Trusted Advisors and their customers using local resources.”
The focal point of the new facility is the Dallas BattleLab, a world class training/demo facility and a key investment in AVANT’s Platform for IT Decision Making. The Dallas BattleLab is an industry leading showplace at which Trusted Advisors can evaluate and demonstrate the technology options available through AVANT and our industry ecosystem. Based on high success rate and partner demand, additional regional BattleLab hubs for other tech centers are also under consideration.
“The BattleLab has become one of the most important tools for IT Decision Making, enabling Trusted Advisors to help clients select technologies that solve business problems,” said Shane McNamara, AVANT’s executive vice president, Channel Sales, East. “We want to enable our Trusted Advisors to serve even more businesses locally by providing a network of regional BattleLab locations close to where they do business.”
The first BattleLab opened in Chicago in 2016, at the company global headquarters. The BattleLab was created as a state-of-the-art training center for Trusted Advisors, a lab to demonstrate UCaaS solutions side by side and an executive briefing center for use by AVANT’s Trusted Advisor community with their customers.
The BattleLab has been used successfully for:
- Helping customers evaluate and select IT solutions
- Live demonstrations with Trusted Advisors and their customers in the UCaaS/CCaaS demo lab
- 100’s of training events
- New Trusted Advisor onboarding sessions
- Webinar broadcasts
A variety of strategic providers have already established presence at AVANT’s HQ-2 in Dallas. These would include:
- 8×8
- Aryaka
- CBTS
- Crown Castle
- Databank
- Dialpad
- EvolveIP
- Five9
- Flexential
- Fuze
- Genesys
- Granite
- GTT
- Intrado
- Masergy
- Mitel
- Netfortris
- NiceIncontact
- NTT
- Oracle
- Rapidscale
- SADA
- Talkdesk
- Tierpoint
- TPx
- Vonage
- Windstream