Esna Technologies Founder Embraces Role Helping Avaya With Strategy Shift

AVAYA EXECUTIVE PARTNER FORUM — Mo Nezarati has been on quite a journey since joining Avaya eight months ago as its vice president of UC applications.

Last May, Avaya acquired Esna Technologies, a Canada-based collaboration and communications software provider. Nezarati was Esna’s CEO and founded the company in 1989.

Avaya incorporated Esna’s line of products and services into its portfolio to help enterprises and midmarket companies adopt applications more quickly.

At this week’s Avaya Executive Partner Forum 2016 in San Diego, Nezarati is addressing partners on Avaya’s unified client desktop strategy. Hundreds of Avaya’s 10,500 active partners are participating in the forum.

In an interview with Channel Partners, Nezarati talked about his experience since joining Avaya and his ongoing mission to change the way Avaya thinks and approaches the market.

Nezarati said one of the reasons why Avaya interested him was the “role they would put me in and the ability I would have to influence a whole bunch of products in a company that owns the largest share of enterprise customers in the world.”

What Nezarati wanted most out of the acquisition was not only to introduce products and start to “morph the way products work,” but to help change the way Avaya “thinks and approaches the market.”{ad}

“I think to a certain extent we’ve been able to start doing that,” he said. “I’m doing it a little bit on the products side, and Lee Ho (Esna’s vice president of marketing) is doing it on the marketing side, and we’ll see if we can throw some token people into sales and shake that up, too.”

Avaya is rapidly transforming into a software and services company, and Nezarati said he’s particularly suited to that mission because he’s a “software guy” whose hobby is reading technology updates.

“Also, over our 20 odd years of history with Esna, one of the things we were always really good at is …

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… reading the tea leaves of where the market is going,” he said.

As vice president of UC applications, Nezarati said he’s been focused on assembling a group of applications that will have a “common user experience and a common feel.” 

“I’ve only been here around eight months and I’ve started to make some fundamental changes in and around what we do on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “And then we’re creating some new projects and new directions, and trying to forge new paths for Avaya that I think will be interesting.”

Nezarati was pleased to hear Laurent Philonenko, Avaya’s chief technology officer, tell partners this week that the company is spending above the industry average on research and development.

“If there was no commitment to innovation, I would resign tomorrow,” he said. “I’m just the kind of guy that money doesn’t turn me on and things don’t turn me on. Building things, and working and innovating is what drives me.”

Avaya is “definitely innovating at a very fast pace” and “should be going faster, in my opinion,” Nezarati said.

“When you’re building brand-new solutions, there’s a lot more thought that has to go into it, but when you’re adding a feature to an iPhone app or making your version of iPhone support … those are less important in terms of the work that you have to do,” he said.