India is a large market with big opportunities

Though global economies were hit hard by the economic recession, the Indian market managed to fight it more effectively, prompting many global enterprises to tap the potential of it.

Avaya India's new managing director Jangoo Dalal speaks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News in the context of the growing potential of Indian market and also Avaya’s India strategy and approach. Excerpts from the interview:

From Avaya’s perspective, which kind of strategy have you planned for the Indian market?

We have been present in India for almost a decade through a joint venture and then as subsidiary called Avaya GlobalConnect. But for the first time now, Avaya is setting up its own presence and team in India to address its customers and the market. So from Avaya’s perspective we want to take advantage of the opportunities which India has and there are quiet a few. And also, India is one of the important markets for us.

Our plan to tap the potential is a simple combination of two or three things. And we believe, the way to succeed in Indian market is through channel partnerships and channel relationships. As we speak, we are in the process of tying up channels like large distributors and resellers.

We have already tied up with Redington, finished the training process of their people, getting the processes and systems in place. We have also signed up the Delhi-based Bharti Telecom, the manufacturing-distribution arm of Bharti.

On the system integration (SI), we are talking to some of the large SI in India. We are starting off with people that have global relationship with us as well as some large domestic players here. IBM, Orange, AT&T are some of the global relationships we have.

India is a large heterogeneous market with big opportunities from SMBs and for that you need to have large numbers of value-added resellers (VARs). As we speak, we are looking up to time the market and already have signed a few and are in talks with others. And by the December end, we hope to have something like minimum of 50 VARs across India carrying our products.

So the number one thing we are doing is expanding our channel reach, second is addressing the Indian market by our own sales force and for that we are taking the vertical approach, where we think that some verticals in India need more focus and has huge opportunities.

One of them is the telecom service provider segment, that’s really booming even in the downturn, it’s doing very well and our technologies, whether Unified Communications (UC) or Contact Centers, are very highly used by these people.

This apart, we are focusing on verticals such as government, defense and telemedicine. We have some of the very robust solutions in e-governance and defense segment, which we plan to bring to India. And with our past investments in resources, large research and development centers, we want to leverage them to create solutions and services for this market.

What kind of technology trends you see in the Indian market?

More and more people are moving towards Unified Communications (UC). In the past, organizations had different networks or only some part of communications like voice, data or video. Today we see more integration of all these technologies - voice, data, video and instant messaging into one common service, which is what Unified Communications is all about. Fundamentally, that’s the trend, which is gathering great speed in India.

We see large enterprises, large service providers as well as small and medium customers embracing Unified Communications, which is basically anywhere anytime any device on any kind of interface or platform. Irrespective of whether you are using smart or basic mobile phone or you are at home on PC or Skype, customers today want to have a unified approach to communications. So that’s the trend we clearly see in India; though it was slow to take-off, now it is gaining speed.

Secondly, we see the whole trend towards virtualization and in turn leading to cloud computing. We see that it is gathering speed because today we have solutions from vendors like ourselves who allow people to virtualize lots of things. For example, recently we launched the Avaya Aura System platform, which is our version of virtualization based on Open virtualization technology that allows fantastic benefits to organizations and enterprises.

Third trend is the concept of contact centers becoming more and more oriented towards self-service and becoming more and more intelligent. And one of our key businesses comes from contact centers and they are becoming center to various businesses.

If you look at any large telcos, it is very unlikely that you will meet any one in the organization because they will ask you to contact via a dialing or toll free number, web, SMS or interactive voice response system (IVR). So the contact centers are getting more intelligent and self serving, and for that the back ends need to be more integrated, where people like us play the key roles.

How important are small and medium businesses (SMBs) for Avaya’s business?

For us SMBs are very important not just in India but globally. SMBs in developing and emerging markets like India are extremely important. Our philosophy for the SMB market is a little different from the other IT vendors. Typically what we have seen is that most vendors try to take any enterprise solution, downsize it, remove some features and then offer it to SMBs. But in our case it really doesn’t work, as SMBs' requirements are unique as they need low total cost of ownership with less complexity, less features but still want to have cutting edge.

So our philosophy at Avaya has been to develop products to ground up for SMB segment rather than take enterprise products, although we are very good at the enterprise level globally with high market share with some 490 enterprise using our solutions out of the fortune 500 companies. But we are not taking that enterprise products and downsizing it for SMBs.

Our latest Avaya IP Office Release 5 is the ground up designed product for SMBs. It is a simple one box server solution that takes care of all call routings with all communication features at affordable cost, easy deployment and has green technology with lower power consumption. It has resilient feature, which allows the SMBs to use the same box even if its business grows bigger, and saves cost.

Name
Email
Comment Here
Code Verification

What's Data up to?

Dell's Windows 8 tablets to cost $199

Windows 8 will support future applications: Ballmer

Euro 2012 free app for Android

Microsoft to incubate 10 Indian startups

Why 122,680 Facebookers 'like' Nirmal Baba?

Do you think IT employees need unions?

Book your trip to Vaishno Devi online

Can Aamir Khan bring down female foeticide?

DataWind terms Aakash II launch a revolution

Subscribe to PCQuest for iPad & Android tablets

Register Free at DQ Top 20 Online portal & get insights on the Indian IT Industry

Enterprise IT News and Analysis in your inbox

Subscribe to the free PCQuest newsletter

Do you think IT employees need unions?

Arun and Cipla - no ladders, no snakes

Cyber attacks: Have India's neighbours turned culprits?

Personal cloud will eclipse PC: Gartner

SMEs don't give much importance to security

Sponsored Links

Custom Site

Demo Downloads On :

1-Click News Updates