At a time when the enterprises are looking at increasing their productivity through flexible utilization of resources – applications around mobility, collaboration and communication are helping them achieve this.
Arun Shetty, Director of Collaboration Solutions – India , Avaya speaks with Zia Askari from Channeldrive.in on how the company is targeting this segment of UCaaS and why channel partners are important for Avaya today.
What is your focus to target the UCaaS market in India? How big would be the opportunity in India?
According to Gartner reports, the global Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market is projected to grow from $2.52 billion in 2013 to $7.62 billion by 2018, an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.8 per cent. The Global Unified Communications market has also been witnessing the integration of unified communication and social networking.
The unified communications industry in India is poised to grow; and we see growth in the adoption of IP Telephony by enterprises (both large and mid-size) and also the small business. Enterprises have started adopting and will continue to deploy applications to deliver breakthrough experience and increase productivity, mobility applications, conferencing (audio, video web) will continue to grow.
One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing need for information sharing among organizations. Also, cloud based access is making unified communication available for a wider range of organizations and end users in India and all over the world. The shift from on-premises to cloud based unified communication model will be the key driver for unified communication to grow in the future.
We at Avaya are now shifting our focus towards the mid-market sector which is the fastest growing sector in today’s economy. Our focus on mid-market is fairly new in India specifically because we are a growing organization. We are launching new programs specifically designed to enable more channel partners in the rapidly growing mid-market space – accelerating their time to revenue. We have an active incentive program in place, and have further programs launching in 2014 to ensure our channels remain fully engaged and that we grow in partnership together.
Our go-to-market strategy in India is majorly through channels. In the last two years, we have been focusing on the growth of our multi-channel model. Avaya has an extensive network of platinum, gold, silver and authorized partners. Many of these are Tier I partners which help drive our enterprise market. They are equipped with well-developed sales, engineering and support skills.
Apart from that, there is also a Tier II and Tier III structure particularly for expansion, geographical coverage and vertical coverage in the small or mid-market where, in collaboration with our distributor partners, we work towards identifying, onboarding, recruiting and enabling a series of channel play for greater market reach.
What kind of products and solutions do you have that can help in UCaaS model?
Our people-centric solutions integrate voice, video and data, enabling users to communicate and collaborate in real time, in the mode best suited to each interaction. This eliminates inefficiencies in communications to make organizations more productive and responsive.
Our solutions feature strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with financial remediation. Our industry-leading service delivery organization, backed by our ground-breaking management platform, enables Avaya to manage communications infrastructures of any age, with products and applications from any vendors, and in any geographic location.
Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for unified communications solutions and technology that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and ultimately competitiveness. Our increasing focus on the mid-market sector includes providing the means to the mid-sized businesses, to enable them to compete with larger enterprises by leveraging unified communications and collaboration. Unified Communications simplify the proliferation of technologies that businesses deal with on a day to day basis.
What could be some of the challenges that are holding the adoption of UCaaS back?
UC is increasingly viewed as a valuable platform that can offer numerous benefits across the entire enterprise. Unified Communications is the new paradigm for employee communications as it allows employees to reach faster, help businesses to reduce product development cycles, enhance team communication and move products to the market sooner, thus resulting in higher productivity.
UC is also accessible from essentially anywhere via PCs, smartphones, and similar devices. These technologies include e-mail, texting, instant messaging, and group chat, voice and video calls and conferences; directories, calendars and tasks; and various assemblies of these functions into job-specific applications such as mobility applications or collaborative workspaces.
The potential to not only eliminate the “middleware” role that has so many workers shuttling information from one system to the next, but to lead them to become the idea developer is immense with help of Unified Communication. Hosted UC by definition supports reaching any device (desk phone, laptop, tablet and smartphone) using a single number. UC is basically a convergence of multiple communications technologies into a single solution. It is important for organization planning to deploy a Unified Communications s platform across their enterprise to keep the following pitfalls in mind while working on an implementation strategy.
To maximize return on investment, enterprises must invest in evaluation of communication challenges, prioritization in alignment with business needs, and develop cost-cutting and revenue generating strategies that will enable successful deployment. At Avaya, we provide solutions that are designed in order to provide cost benefits to our partners and hence helping them in increasing their level of productivity.
Where are the deployments happening in this space?
Deployment of unified communication can be seen across a wide spectrum of businesses. Business of almost all shapes and sizes opt for UC services. The scale of deployment varies according to the size of the businesses. Mid –size businesses usually deploy such solutions at a much smaller scale as compared to a business of a larger size.
The deployment of unified communications brings many benefits to companies, particularly in lowering communications, conferencing and travel expenses. It can slash the total cost of telephony ownership. Equally important are the productivity savings it can provide.
This includes softer benefits such as making communications tools easier to use and increasing collaboration, to more tangible benefits such as accelerating workflow, shortening the time it takes to make decisions and boosting innovation. CIOs often start a return on investment (ROI) study by examining infrastructure savings. These are the opportunities derived from centralizing dispersed communications servers into a single data center, reducing communications expense.
How can UCaaS take advantage of virtualization and cloud techniques today?
Virtualization is making inroads in the unified communications market, no matter the size of the enterprise customer. Whether as a large scale deployment in an enterprise data center or as a turnkey appliance, unified communications virtualization is likely the next logical step for customers and vendors alike. On the surface, unified communications virtualization is a logical progression for enterprises. As the traditional PBX has given way to IP telephony, the hardware and software elements of unified communications have become disparate components, with IP telephony gateways connecting the outside world to software-driven call control, voice mail and call center services.
Virtualization and cloud technologies are also changing the form factor of unified communications for mid-sized enterprises. To fill the gap between hosted or small-scale solutions for small businesses and large-scale deployments for top-tier enterprises, unified communications vendors are offering virtualized modules of unified communications services deployed in turnkey appliances. Through virtualization, the mid-sized customer can mix and match the services it needs.
Many organizations have been taking advantage of virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce server counts, and gain operational advantages. When it comes to business critical workloads, migration to virtualization and the cloud has encountered more resistance, and roadblocks. One of the primary advantages of cloud-based delivery is that cloud-aware applications are able to elastically use the underlying infrastructure. Today, from a programmatic perspective, both storage and compute are completely elastic.
Can you share some of the case studies where UCaaS is changing the way enterprise communicate?
Bella Vista, a boutique hotel has installed Avaya Communications Manager in its facility to seamlessly connect guests and workforce. The Bella Vista was looking for a communication system that could “give comfort to its customers.” The system should help customers who look forward to using telephony or Internet. The new communication system that the hotel required, needed to integrate with the system that was already in use.
The Communications Manager that the hotel implemented is Avaya 3800 with a gateway that helps the property connect 100 analog lines and 30 ISDN and PRI nodes. The system allows The Bella Vista to monitor the telephony usage in the rooms—the metering system allows them to monitor calls. The platform also allows the hotel to control the Internet usage and ensures secure connection. The Avaya system combines the solution with The Bella Vista’s Property Management System, giving them an integrated system. This provides the hotel a single platform to work on, making things much simpler to use.
Avaya helps companies simplify complex communications and integrate with technologies from other vendors, enabling customers to unlock value and potential from their network by embedding communications into the operations of an enterprise.
