Clocking a 50% y-o-y growth from the SME business, Avaya aims at strengthening its hold in this space by lowering the entry barrier for UC solutions. By Heena Jhingan
With almost 20% global market share in the Unified Communications space, Avaya is aspiring to make its foothold stronger in the Indian market, by extending the latest version of its UC platform IP Office 8.1 to a large under served SME market in India.
The $ 5.5 bn strong, US-based data networking, contact centres and conferencing player is looking to move out from the shadow of being a ‘large enterprise only’ solutions provider.
In India, Avaya has traditionally been bullish on the contact centres front, working with companies that provide different types of IT services, contact centres being the mission critical piece of the entire revolution.
“The growth of ITeS business and the need for them to integrate with the large enterprise clients has brought us to an interesting exposition in the Indian market. The mid market companies are the ones, who return to health fastest in a recovering economy, they are the ones that are going to be spending on IT over the next two years, and interestingly their needs are no different from that of the large enterprises,said Brad Gifford, Senior Director-Global Channels, Avaya.
The UC market in India is a tough turf, dominated by players like Cisco, Polycom and Microsoft, all of whom have their own SME portfolios. There are other players like LifeSize, who have been eyeing the SMB pie in India.
Adil Doctor, Director – SME Business-APAC, Avaya was of the opinion that even though the large vendors have solutions for the mid market, they offer only certain functionalities and not the complete UC suite.
“We understand the Indian market, is still largely Analog. We have a hybrid solution that allows users to do Analog telephony, IP and SIP all in the same box. The companies could start with absolutely basic telephony and also have all the UC feature functionality, collaborative ability and build a small contact centre on top of it. It is like an end to end story for a SME customer, not only today but also in the future. India is a price-sensitive market, we have created very aggressive pricing bundles for the SMEs to start with. The perception that Avaya is a large enterprise brand is a myth,Doctor stressed.
The power bundle
He said that the new version for the SMEs had been diligently designed for the segment, keeping their expectations in view. Avaya IP Office 8.1 can now scale up to a thousand users in a single location (up from 384). It can serve companies with as few as five employees, and has added mobility, management and security features as well as custom-built services to help SMEs take advantage of BYOD environments and advanced mobility.
IP Office 8.1 comes with Avaya Flare Communicator, a mobility application, which was previously available to large enterprises only. It is now available on iPads or Windows laptop, and it enables mobile access to collaboration capabilities such as business-class calling, presence, company directory search, and management of two simultaneous calls while the user is mobile.
Another interesting feature that is a part of the new version is the centralised management and licensing capability. This eliminates the complexity of overseeing communications for multi-site environ-ments by enabling effective management of several sites from one location.
The users of these solutions can also use IP Office Support Service, which is the first support service from the company for SMEs. The service provides fast resolution, technical support from experts, and secure remote access. Embedded SSL-VPN capabilities help ensure the secure delivery of upgrades, patches and Web-based services.
The Indian pie
Gifford explained that the IP office platform has all the technologies that would typically be required by an enterprise for collaboration. The product is growing fast and they are now bringing it to India to push it further.
“I believe LifeSize is a room centric solution, they have been able to come to the mainstream with Cisco and Polycom. They have a lower entry price point that has helped them grow in the mid market. However, we are not coming in from purely a price angle. We are looking at it from any device perspective, which we think will take us ahead of LifeSize. We believe that we will be able to offer greater value with complete offering around not just video, but also UC. We have made some technology acquisitions like Radvision and Scopia over the last three years. We believe that we are in a unique situation to make UC a widely accepted solution that will democratise the use of video with access not in just board rooms, but across devices.
Besides, the company claims that all its competitors in this space do not offer true ‘any device’ capability until the enterprise uses the service for up to 500 users or more, Avaya claims to offer seamless compatibility all the way down to 10 or 5 users as the company believes that it is about the app and that must work on any device.
According to an independent research by Avaya in the Indian market, 60% of SMEs want to deploy UC. The study shows that the SMEs believe that conferencing is the most used application and has highest user RoI.
“We are putting nearly 16-17 % of the product revenue back into the R&D. We launched this product in 2002, the latest version is 8.1, we are now working on IP Office 9.0. We are focusing on lowering the entry barrier. It is open architecture so it naturally integrates with all the enterprise products be it Salesforce.com, or third party video solutions,Doctor said.
The company also sees a bright future for Cloud offerings. ?e think Cloud is real, we have several offerings in the Cloud space. In India, we have Cloud-based solutions for the service provider community. We sell that service under the service provider brand. We will also Virtualize the IP Office that will open up newer hosting options for our partners and services providers,he added.
The road map for the India market is clear. Doctor signed off, saying that the company had been investing in India – specific products, and will continue to do so. They have a structured partner programme called Avaya Connect. Their India business for SME has been growing at about 50% y-o-y, which is a very high growth rate in the segment across the region, and with announcement of the latest UC offering for SMEs, they hope to fare much better.
