Avaya aspires to provide ultimate customer experience 

In a chat with VARINDIA, Vishal Agarwal, Managing Director, India & SAARC and Chiradeep Rao Channel Head, India & SAARC, the two eminent leaders at Avaya vividly discussed about the company’s strategy, its investment plans for the India market and the present channels ecosystem besides talking about the rapid digitization of technology -

Digitisation no doubt harnesses productivity for organisations. As a result of digitisation of technologies, conventional methods and operating systems have gradually metamorphosed into the digital system. This new wave of digitisation is helping every sector and industry to evolve and aiding companies to increase mobility, efficiency of the workforce and enhancing the flexibility of an organisation. 

Avaya has carved out a niche with its tech advanced devices and is beefing up its position in the Indian market. It has been delivering a wide range of products and software services for enhanced user experience to its customers and plans to make lives better in India by contributing to the Government’s dream project of making India Digitised. 

Talking on the current market and Avaya’s position in the Indian market, Vishal Agarwal said, “India is a very critical market and one of the top 10 markets across the globe, and we are making a lot of investments in this market. We have a very strong R&D team, global services and a consulting team based out of India and quite a few of our back office work also happens out of India. So, India is a very strategically placed market for Avaya”.

Strategy & Investment plans...

Avaya serves in all the verticals, whether it is the service provider, the finance sector, the govt organisations, healthcare, or manufacturing. “In terms of our strategy, it is more around the customers, to see how we can give a differentiated experience to them and help them to consume the technology that they believe in. We believe customers will define the way technology will be consumed. We need to provide open architecture and platform and help our customers to deliver the solution and customise it the way the customer needs. That’s our differentiating aspect and the focus on the technology,” asserted Vishal. 

To survive in this market with a good strategy a company also needs focus. Vishal said that his focus is on three main areas – the first is the large enterprises in terms of helping them to evolve through the customer engagement journey; the second is focusing on digital India by identifying the ways of how it can contribute to the govt. vision and the third is the rapid expansion in the current market and the commercial space.  

As part of the its investment plans with regard to Channel expansion, sales & marketing and market expansion Vishal said that Avaya is hiring new people and training & developing its partners. “We are helping our partners to evolve through their technology and growing with their end customers is again a part of our investment,” he said. 

Channel eco-system...
Channel holds a substantive position for Avaya. They represent the company to customers while helping it in new customer acquisition and generating sales.  Avaya counts its channel partners as very crucial. Avaya has differentiated its partners broadly in the five categories - classical partners who cater to enterprise; global SIs & SPs; partners who cater to the mid market including SMBs; the cloud partners and finally the distributors. “As Avaya cannot individually cater to every single partner, we have the distributors who cater to the smaller and tier 2 partners,” pointed out Chiradeep Rao.

He continued, “We have this partner program called ‘Avaya Edge’ where we tie, certify and provide skill our partners. This is typical of any program across OEM, but what we done is we have made it simple.” 

Avaya also spends money every quarter in the areas of certification and skilling, and the company chooses it according to what it thinks the partners need to skill up on. “It’s a sort of mutual process,” said Chiradeep. “We identify the gaps for them and then together decide how to address these gaps.” 

Avaya has a presence in three different areas including, networking, voice collaboration, contact centres and video. It has made its programs simple to the extent that if a partner wants to excel in just one technology, Avaya tries to enable him in that technology and gets him certified in it. “You don’t have to learn all the products that we have,” summed up Chiradeep.