Avaya Partner Conference: Shift in Market Means Shift in Strategy

The last 12 months have seen shifts in market forces that, as a result, are changing the way Avaya is positioning itself with its customers and partners to gain greater market share, said executives on day one of the 2014 Avaya Executive Partner Forum, being held this week in Cancun.

“The quest for healthy business is the main attribute of our entire strategy,” said Pierre-Paul Allard, vice president of Global Sales at Avaya. “The challenge is moving from managing the business from benchmarking to becoming the benchmark in the industry.”

To do that, Avaya has taken steps to change the way it does business, focusing more on the opportunities in the midmarket and pushing more into a sales model that puts more emphasis on the channel partner.

Additionally, the company is shifting away from the on-premise solution mindset into one that also includes cloud and hybrid solutions.

“Six months ago, we had three operating theaters with widely distributed resources and complex operations—we heard from [our partners] that doing business with Avaya was hard, and we had an enterprise focus,” Allard said. “We’ve worked to segment our customer base, starting by extending our operating theaters into six, and segmenting our teams more heavily across the board into 11 Global Centers of Excellence, including executives who would bring in value to those centers of excellence. We also have made it easier to work with our operations, and we’ve broadened our focus to embrace the midmarket,” an area that amounts to a $21 billion opportunity for Avaya’s channel partners.

Avaya also is working hard to compress the sales cycle to 45 days, answering another gripe its channel partners had with the communications and networking company. “We recognize that it isn’t about the time it takes to process, it’s about the opportunity cost,” Allard said. “We are losing business because we can’t solve these issues in a hurry.”

Richard Steranka, vice president of Worldwide Channels, noted that in surveying its partners, Avaya learned what the company did well. Specifically, Avaya excelled at solutions quality, account support, sales and design training and distributor performance. However, it needed improvement in billing and support, delivery, professional services and maintenance and technical support.

“We’ve been working hard to improve, and to ensure our focus is in the right areas,” he said.

As a result, Avaya’s revenue has shifted to two-thirds derived from software and services, and now more than 79 percent of its sales go through the channel. “There is always a partner play in everything we do,” Steranka said.

Avaya also is putting more emphasis on cloud services as more companies look to shift their IT spend to an OpEx model, and is working to expand its products and services offerings in a “services evolution,” he noted.

Steranka also pointed out the areas where Avaya’s channel partners are seeing the most growth; specifically:

“Where is the spend? Are we focused on growing or declining markets? These were the questions we were asking ourselves, and one of the things we recognize is that value has moved up the stack to software spaces,” he said.

“We now have the technology to address all these markets. There should be no reason why we have to walk away from business,” Steranka said.