Avaya and Unified Communications at their partner conference in ...

Avaya?s conference in Bangkok sees them talking dollars and sense, as they rally partners to face the new year head-on.

Avaya?s annual channel partner conference in Bangkok, which saw over 200 selected individuals from Avaya?s strategic channel partners and distributors in 15 countries, kicked off last October with CEO Kevin Kennedy saying, ?Execution is everything and the details matter.? During the conference, it also seemed that Avaya wanted to change their engagement with customers, with more emphasis on solutions to problems and business requirements instead of point products.

A quick survey of the attendees before the event proper also revealed a few positive things to keep growth upbeat for the year 2012. For example, 90-percent expect growth in high single digits or double digits, for the year. Francois Lancon, President for Avaya in Asia Pacific says, ?We have built a very strong Avaya Connect channel partner community in this region, and our event recognised the achievements and support that community continues to provide in support of our customers across APAC.?

Avaya?s 2012 priorities for APAC
Lancon painted a scenario of robust sales even though the global economy has seen tough times and isn?t fully out of the woods yet. It was on that positive note of growth that he outlined the priorities for 2012.

?We are going to attack the mid-sized enterprise. We approach a lot of SMEs without paying it much attention. In our product portfolio, we have great mid-market solutions. If we pay attention to it, we can easily double revenue, especially when you consider our solutions portfolio and the channel network that we have in that segment.?

2011 also saw Avaya launching as many as over 60 products, a sizeable number of them being software-based solutions.

Avaya?s APAC chief says, ?We also want to grow our software solutions because software is sticky whilst hardware is commoditised. We need to move up the value chain. You can make more money selling software.?

2012 for Lancon ? the midsized market, software solutions and end-to-end solutions would be keywords.

Avaya is also trying to get its game face on when it comes to delivering a full-stack of solutions, all the way from the network up to devices at the end user level. The y are probably in a better position to do so now as data networking technologies from their Nortel acquisition start to mature and harden with existing Avaya solutions. Lancon says, ?There is guarantee you can make money in the data business.?

Later in an interview, Lancon shares, ?Yes, I want them to sell end-to-end solutions, I want them to sell all data products, and yes I want them to sell the full stack. As an example, if you want to make a video call with your iPad to twenty other people, you?d probably need a very different WiFi infrastructure than the one in this building. I want to ensure that I guarantee you the level of bandwidth and the device that enables 20 video connections.
?Those are the things we can do, those are the things that very few companies can do, no other company can do. So, that?s why end-to-end becomes interesting because what our data portfolio guarantees to customers is the end-to-end experience quality.?

Session-based communications
A little known fact, which hasn?t been publicised much in the news, is that Avaya?s global CTO office was set up just a few months before the event in Bangkok. CTO of Avaya in APAC, Muneyb Minhazzudin says, ?The fundamental charter for the CTO?s office is to evangelise the vision, the strategy of the company to our industry, our channels and to our customers predominantly from the perspective of where we have made a lot of innovations.?

The unified communications (UC) market has changed tremendously from standard phone systems to consumerisation of the whole market place, according to Muneyb. What this means is a shift of focus on infrastructure to a focus now on the user experience. ?There?s a push to support user experience like on tablets and smartphones.?

The idea is that communications should be seamless; why end a chat on an instant messenger (IM) just because you are leaving the desktop and your office, when you could continue it on a mobile device, for example? ?IM, voice, video, SMS, email? you?ve got a whole set of options and you want to unify that (experience).?

Avaya?s first iteration of that could well be the one-X. ?one-X was our one experience across all modalities (devices). It?s our terminology for our softphone on a PC, the same (softphone) client runs on your mobile phone. The goal was to provide that simple one user experience across all modalities.?
But the evolution of that, Avaya Flare, is closer to showing the changes in the core communications architecture that Avaya is spearheading with their Avaya Aura strategy since mid-2009.

?When we first launched Aura, it was hard to articulate some of its capabilities, so the Flare experience actually captures all of that, in an easy, visual way so users can now relate to it and not have to worry about the back end.?

The first hardware manifestation of Flare was the Avaya Desktop Video Device or ADVD, which was meant for customers to see the flexibility, seamlessness and benefits that Aura architecture was allowing them. But, the focus for Avaya never was and probably never will be, hardware. In line with what Francois Lancon outlined earlier to a room full of partners and dealers, Muneyb emphasises, ?The innovation is in the software.?

At the end of the day, the Flare software solution is targeting to get itself onto devices from other vendors, most notably tablets from Apple, Android and even mobile phones. In fact, Flare can already be found on iPads.

Munyeb shares, ?We didn?t have the right platform at first, so we had to wait for a bit to figure out how to, you know, take it to market, so therefore, we came out with our own device, the ADVD, but we also targeted it to a very specific market. So, it was never going to be a tablet, it was going to be a desktop device. Hence the naming convention to reinforce that, whilst developing high-definition video with the whole Flare experience.?

Application sequencing
Another interesting feature about session-based communications, which is also creating opportunities in the third-party software developer space, is application sequencing. ?It?s built into Aura so you don?t have to bolt everything into your organisation, but as per your requirements. You don?t have to break your whole architecture to add features and functions in,? the APAC CTO lead explains.

According to Muneyb, instead of evolving PABX systems and re-architecting communications core for next-generation communications, organisations can dynamically provide the services that users want to use.

The Networking Side to Avaya
For the past year, Avaya made a resounding stamp of dominance in unified collaborations, across some markets in the Asia Pacific region. However, they have yet to make any noise with the technologies and products that they acquired from their 2009 Nortel acquisition.
That said, the mood was upbeat when Lancon revealed 2012 is the year that Avaya wants to monetise their Nortel enterprise business assets.

Truth be told, in recent years as the mindset that applications, services and hardware would be useless without a good networking solution to tie it all together, started to truly grip the industry, networking solutions providers have popping out of the woodwork. For Avaya, 2012 would also be the year to discover if their products are really up to snuff against the niche or integrated networking solutions out there in the market.

In an interview later, Jean Turgeon, president and global general manager for Avaya Networking says, ?So, a few things we had to do was to get focused and put a strategy together that would differentiate us from the competition.?

That strategy included making strong announcements with regards to their commitment to the data centre. It also birthed a new networking architecture called Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture or VENA. Phase one of Avaya?s long-term strategy is focused on the data centre, but they left no stone unturned when they introduced phase two in February 2011, focusing on the campus. Phase three was generally about a management platform and provisioning tools that would help facilitate the movement of virtual machines within or across data centres.

Source: http://www.liveatpc.com/2012-avaya-digs-their-heels-in

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