Tata-Avaya to focus on enterprises for IP telephony

MUMBAI: Tata-Avaya is planning to shift its focus from contact center to enterprises in the IP telephony market in India. The company is expecting equal amount of business from enterprises as well as from contact centers. Currently, 75 percent of its business comes from contact centers and rest from enterprises.

According to Tata-Avaya strategy converged solutions division senior manager Suchitra Srinivasan, "India and China are the primary markets for Avaya and we foresee huge growth in this area."

Frost and Sullivan has projected IP telephony market to grow to $40 million this financial year and Tata-Avaya expects to garner 50 percent of this market share.

The company is also projecting an overall growth of 25 percent every year. Its future plans include a foray into IP based PBX's with web-enabled, multimedia functionality. Tata-Avaya provides software as well as hardware for IP telephones and its focus now would be on modular applications and open standard based software.

Currently, the company enjoys around 60 percent of the total market in both traditional and IP-based PBX's with 20 percent of the business coming from IP having 6,000+ customers. The contact centers are the biggest customers in the IP space accounting for 40 percent of the revenues. Apart from contact centers, BFSI and defense are the biggest domains.

Srinivasan also emphasized the fact that though most market forecasts predict a rapid shift to IP telephony and convergence the market in India would still continue to be a mixed one with both traditional and IP telephony to work together. "The customers are going to shift to IP-based PBX based only on business benefits and ROI," she added.

(CNS)