Avaya Reports Reseller Success in the Midmarket

Avaya is holding its Americas Partner Executive Forum in Cancun, Mexico, this week, and talking up its successes, particularly in the midmarket.

The company just started focusing on that sector about six months ago and says bookings were up 24 percent last quarter. Of course, the question is, what took Avaya so long to target the 1,000-and-smaller user segment?

“I think we probably took too much of a parochial view in that we would guard the higher end” after acquiring Nortel’s BCM line, Tom Mitchell, senior vice president and president of Avaya Go-To-Market, told Channel Partners in a telephone interview on Thursday. “We had a transition issue that we overcame.”

So, Avaya has changed its tune in recent months, spurring its channel partners to pursue the $800 billion worldwide midmarket opportunity. As a result, Avaya said it has sold 300,000 IP Office deployments and that Aura is gaining market share as well. For partners, there’s another plus to increasing mid-market customers, Mitchell said: Resellers are reporting larger deal sizes, often reaching several hundred-thousand dollars, higher margins than expected (often 30 percent and higher), and quicker time-to-cash than they see with enterprise sales.

Of course, Avaya remains keen on the enterprise space, too. Mitchell said applications are doing especially well in that market as the economy remains flat.

In other updates, Avaya didn’t have news to share about its Collaborative Cloud initiative or the Radvision acquisition, but it did say its Avaya Outsourcing Solutions (AOS), which are managed services, offering has taken off.

“The market uptick with AOS has been extremely good and the reason is, in a flat economy, people are looking to focus on key areas of their business,” Mitchell said. “We look at that as a strong growth lever for fiscal year ’13.”

Avaya also just launched its partner marketing tool, with features including branding materials, and CRM capabilities for tracking open and response rates.