Avaya Partner Conference: Our SIP Bet is Paying Off

The VAR Guy was ready for a conversation about standards during the 2012 Avaya U.S./Gov Sales Leadership and Partner Conference; specifically, whether SIP is gaining ground as the de facto communications standard. But Avaya SVP Alan Baratz beat our resident blogger to the punch during his presentation by declaring Avaya picked a winner with its decision to build with SIP.

“If you look at the unified communications market, 2011 was a year in which our bet on SIP really started to pay off,” he said. “Today two-thirds of communications carriers worldwide have SIP trunking available at a reasonable price.”

Which means Avaya’s SIP-based communications offerings, including its Aura platform, are ideally positioned to meet the needs of the enterprise head on, Baratz said.

Indeed, Steve Feitz, vice president and general manager of U.S. Channels, noted SIP is helping drive Avaya’s growth, including the company’s highest sales-out booking in 16 quarters in Q4 2011 and a 250 percent increase in the sales amounts for its top 11 deals. “In 2011 we went whale hunting,” he said.

And in 2012 Avaya plans to accelerate growth among its partners, emphasizing transparency between Avaya’s sales leadership and its channel partners during customer engagements as well as utilizing a “divide and conquer focus on both greenfield and new customer opportunities,” Feitz said.

Many of those opportunities will arise from what Avaya President and CEO Kevin Kennedy termed “the evolving enterprise,” which will be influenced by several factors including the consumerization of IT (surprise!) and SIP (surprise!) and evolving business models such as cloud computing (surprise!).

“We will be the most open [solution] — we have to be, because it makes sense and because it is the right thing to do,” he said. “Looking ahead, the issue most conversations will come down to is the notion of open [architecture] — we are open.”

Our resident blogger agrees SIP is the future of communications, just as TCP/IP was crowned king of the networking space. It can be an easy conversation for partners to have with their customers — touting the benefits of a SIP network and its interoperability, not to mention the cost savings associated with a converged voice/data network. But the pressures of a volatile economy and strapped budgets could mean partners are talking, but right now not many customers are listening.