At last year’s Americas Partner Conference in Cancun, Mex., Avaya unveiled a product transition strategy along with channel growth road map that would see the networking vendor evolve from selling hardware into a software applications developer for communications and collaboration.
The road so far has been met with a senior executive shake-up that saw Avaya’s top technology evangelist Alan Baratz leave the company along with a major distraction from a potential initial public offering. Beyond these stumbling blocks the Canadian operations has accelerated its growth through the channel on Avaya new product road map.
Avaya Canada channel chief Renzo Dipasquale told CDN that the subsidiary’s overall business is up eight per cent and the fastest growing segment is from the VAR community many of which have reported double digit growth.
Dipasquale said that while the transition is happening he cautioned that Avaya still offers hardware, software and services and that strategy will continue in the near future. “Our portfolio is moving in the software applications area and we are offering VMware capability for virtualized environments. We also have Aura and that is making us more of a software applications vendor,” he said.
Another factor for the growth is that Avaya’s market transition opens the company and its channel partners up to potential new customers.
Dipasquale added that when you look at the market opportunities the channel has with solutions for the cloud, for video and for new data it enables channel partners to dabble in unified communications or offer a customer to expand its network. It can even explore solutions for the Bring Your Own Device trend. “We are enabled with Android, Apple, other tablet devices, smart phones for unified communications so if a customer asks how do I do video? A solution provider can now change the network or update the network for video, which opens up so many opportunities to partners. They no longer have to be one-trick ponies and its here were they can make more margins selling the Avaya stack,” Dipasquale added.
Eventually the Avaya stack will include technology from Radvision, a video collaboration vendor the company acquired for $230 million. Avaya hopes to close this deal soon and Dipasquale said when the integration is complete channel partners will be able to offer both SIP and H232 video standards and not be tied to just one. Radvision also sports solutions for entry-level to large systems giving Avaya an end-to-end video portfolio. “This opens up a whole new market for Avaya in Canada and the world. It makes us a major player in video,” he said.
Dipasquale added that when the deal is closed he will be working to get Radovision partners in Canada and the U.S. into the fold because he believes they would compliment existing channel partners well.
