We are moving on to become a real-time communication company: Avaya

Nidal Abou-Ltaif, president for Global Growth Markets Theatre, Avaya talks about his partner base in India

How does the PartnerConnect programs help connect, as the name says partner connect, like how it does actually drill down to, what's the takeaway for Avaya in such programs?
The PartnerConnect is the channel program name of Avaya, globally. We do this PartnerConnect every year usually in Q1, which is from October 1st to Dec 31st, and we launch this into all countries. And delay in India happen because we are doing our sales transformations, re alignment of our force we organize in our organization.

Through this event, we give headlines to our partners, also what to expect, what is happening, updates of the happenings and more. We utilize this platform to guide our partners on how to adapt and adopt new programs, products and strategies to be used during to go to market.

Also, it creates communities where people meet together and understand what we do especially from the social point of view. This year we are doing extra things as we at Avaya India had evolved and changed to ‘The New Avaya, India'. We started the transformation in terms of realigning our teams based on segments and aligning our channel to mid-market and enterprise, aligning our professional services and services yet to go and wrap around the solutions we do. Also give indications to our customers about our partners, about the significance of India and growing countries.

So many of our partners want to know, what is Avaya in India or what Avaya does in India. There are 1200 R&Ds placed in India, our service backbone is in India. And many of our partners did not know or they know but they do not know how to capitalize on these resources to manifest their business and their customers.

 

What kind of differences have you observed in terms of maturity or qualification or in general, regarding partners in India and the other countries?
I'll speak about Avaya first, Avaya India partners are usually been big partners, large partners focused on enterprise, focused in contact centers. The wave that came in from the 90s of moving the contact centers from around the world to centralize in India, that's a lot of resources. Today you go around eastern Africa, you would see almost every top notch engineer that has graduated from India, either Avaya India or Avaya partner in India.

The maturity to that level is very high, however, the in-charge of this territory try to train our partners on the rest of Avaya business the IP Telephony line, the live communication, the data and of course the mid-market. They also educate our partners that they need to build some software integration knowledge because it's no longer that you go and install a phone and walk, you have to connect that phone to Microsoft exchange and you have to connect it to CRN, so that's what we see.
The second thing we see in our partners is that they are technical savvy and we convert them from being only technology partners to be also business partners, to understand the business powers of our customers and their customers so that they can sell solution based on work.

With regards to the entire realignment that has happened, what was the need of such realignment or was it like a necessity?
Traditionally, we were a voice company and now we are moving on to become Real Time Communication Company that addresses all forms of media, which means voice data video. And our focus always on enterprise segment, then we have realized that for further growth we have the technology but have to bring it down to the mid-market of small medium business which is a faster growing business, so we have aligned our internal teams and revisited our resources and now have people to address mid-market based on the knowledge they have with the enterprise.
The buying behavior is different in this segment, so we have adopted newer methods. Also we make our changes internally, number one allowing them learn to sell the full stack which means sell the old media we do, voice, data video to our customers and the second one is allowing them to go and sell the construct of a deal. Construct of a deal is what a customer want to buy from us for example a Contact Center or Unified Communication.

We are training our people to make sure that they understand our customers business so the construct that they give are deployed as per their needs. This is most challenging, because the customer looking for an outcome and not for just buying a product and the solution, the outcome is enhance in productivity.

When it comes to realignment is it now vertical specific in Indian market?
It is segment based. Also, in verticals we will continue to address the banking sector, the contact sector, the hospitality and healthcare and ofcourse the government. So these have been and will continue to be our focus areas.

For Avaya, what are the key segments when it comes to Indian market? Do you think it still holds good opportunities?
Yes, it has great opportunities, more than 85% of the company are below 500 employee. There are opportunities in private sector, hospital, banking and significant number of these organizations is all below 500 users.

What would be now the ratio after this overhaul? What is the contribution of enterprise business?
Right now our enterprise business contributes 80% of our business everywhere, we want to grow or business in India by 10% by double digit for next year which is current year now. I think its SMB-SME is the fastest growing segments. Not only for us but in general too, these segments are recruiting more, growing more, most of them are aggressive young companies, they want to complete with the big ones and then the eventually they become enterprise, mid-market enterprise.

What would be the net worth of India SMB market, like probably in a unified communication scenario?
There is no independent study about this segment, we put the enterprise together but very soon we are running our own story to be able to see whether we are growing in this market or not. I will give you that number later on as it will take a few more weeks.

When it comes to Indian market, this realignment that has been happening and there would be definitely new focus and new energy that would be infused into the system. Going ahead, what kind of changes can we expect, coming out of Avaya?
Internally, we are increasing our internal staff by 20%; we are recruiting as a part of this realignment. We are recruiting to mid-market, recruiting towards channel development and recruiting specialists and we are almost finishing recruiting. We want to maintain our momentum, our growth, our customer focus, but we had to upgrade and realign our people. We also had to take some tough decisions for certain individuals too. To change people, to realign people sometimes in agreement, and sometimes in disagreement. I would say today we have a full team and only few more hires to go and some places we are shifting into bigger offices to be able to start an experience center there for our customers to visit and work with us. We have seven locations in India and are going to expand our reach to the partners in the rest of the country.

And in terms of product, are there new ones in the pipeline?
We just released contract centers. There will be more to come, and I can't share the specifics as of now, but definitely we are coming up with more software related products that would integrate with mobility. We are coming up with more video solutions and more attractive and trendy hand-sets for the phone.