"We’re helping our partners stay ahead of the innovation"- Adarsh Kaul- Avaya India

In a candid interaction with Avaya India, Adarsh Kaul, Chief Marketing Officer shared deep insights about the company and channel partner’s benefits and programme.

 What was the thinking behind the creation of Avaya & Friends?

Avaya & Friends is an initiative that we’ve launched to draw attention to the amazing possibilities that are now open to our channel partners and customers as a result of our global alliance programs. It’s an example of us making good on our promise to take an open standards approach to business. Through the programs underneath the Avaya & Friends umbrella, we’ve enabled the creation of cutting-edge solutions built on the Avaya communications platforms that businesses and their employees love.

Which verticals are you targeting with Avaya & Friends?

Name a vertical, and there’s a solution for it through Avaya and its Friends. That said because we’re still expanding every program, some verticals are better catered for than others. Healthcare is an important one; for example, we can now provide access to solutions that integrate the contact center into the hospital information system, vastly improving the patient experience for less of an outlay than the customer may think. Throw in some of the AI products available through Avaya & Friends, and you have a completely customized patient experience where the patient is granted immediate access to his or her preferred agents and medical practitioners.

In hospitality, we’re enabling advanced applications to be built on top of the Avaya Desktop Experience range, meaning hotels can leverage the Internet of Things technologies to offer truly personalized experiences for their guests – both in the room and out.

We’re also enabling advanced solutions for the government, retail and professional services sectors.

How can partners benefit from Avaya & Friends?

At the Avaya Partner Summit in Dubai, we made a lot of promises around enabling partner growth. Avaya & Friends is one of the ways in which we’re making good on those promises, being a major part of the updates we announced to the Avaya Edge partner programme. With it, we’re providing a path for channel partners to move from one value proposition to more advanced ones. Partners will be able to go from box-shifting to solution selling; from solution selling to innovation building; and from innovation building to enabling true business transformation.

And it’s easier than you might think to move to more advanced value propositions with Avaya. The solutions that come under the Avaya & Friends banner are pre-integrated into Avaya’s platforms, meaning we’ve done the hard work for our partners. This makes it simple and cost-effective to deploy genuinely innovative solutions, giving our partners greater opportunity to grow their businesses.

 How is Avaya & Friends helping channel partners to deliver more advanced technologies?

It’s difficult, these days, to keep ahead of the technology curve. Even if you’re a top-of-the-line systems integrator, with expertise in a load of different fields, it’s still a constant battle to stay on top of the technology solutions available and to keep on innovating for your customers.

That’s the issue we’re addressing with Avaya & Friends. Our alliance programs result in industry-specific solutions that would normally be expensive and time-consuming to deploy. But we’ve already done the hard work by integrating these game-changing technologies into our platforms. That makes it easier than ever to deploy advanced solutions.

Our hope is that our channel partners will seize upon this opportunity. It’ll advance their standing as leading innovators, and their customers will be able to see the benefits of these solutions straight away.

In short, we’re helping our partners stay ahead of the innovation game by making it easier to deploy the very latest technologies for their customers.

How will Avaya & Friends affect Avaya’s alliance and partner programs?

Avaya’s existing alliance and partner programs will continue to grow and thrive. Avaya & Friends is simply the umbrella initiative that we’ve launched to draw attention to the amazing things that these programs are enabling.