Alphawest and Avaya seal partnership

Cisco integrator Alphawest has invested in becoming a platinum partner with Avaya, the company announced today.

Alphawest, a former Nortel partner, decided to continue with Avaya after its acquisition of Nortel because it was recognised globally as a leader in the unified communications, said Liam Fraser, general manager of marketing.

"Nortel was a strong existing capability of Alphawest" and it had a number of Nortel customers across the country, said Fraser.

"We have been able to enhance our existing Nortel capability as well as provide the commitment that Avaya are making to support Nortel solutions post the acquisition."

Alphawest received several awards from Cisco last year including one for selling unified communications.

However, the 'relationship with Cisco would not be affected by signing up the rival brand, said Fraser.

"In contrast it's really about further underlining our dominance in this [unified communications] marketplace," he said.

Fraser refused to detail the steps that the integrator had to take in certifying and upgrading its people, processes and technology to qualify for the platinum partnership.

"Some of that information is sensitive to how we go to market. We have an ongoing plan to train and develop our people," said Fraser.

Alphawest also agreed to meet "other commercial requirements" which were understood to include sales targets.

Avaya's products would form a part of its managed services portfolio for the integrator's enterprise and government customers. Alphawest was training staff "to build a managed services capability around unified communications", said Fraser.

Alphawest has become one of the strongest unified communications companies in Australia by selling its IT services alongside Optus' telecommunications sales team, the vendor has claimed. 

"Typically we would have some whole of communications infrastructure contract where the telecommunications requirements and IT requirements would be under a single relationship, a single platform, account management and service delivery," said Fraser.

At Avaya's Asia Pacific partner conference in Beijing last month the vendor discussed plans to integrate Skype into its software to give customers access to Skype's low-cost call structure.

However, using Skype's telephony services would potentially undermine the profitability of calls for telcos, including Alphawest's parent company Optus.

Fraser said regarding Skype: "I'm not specifically aware of those plans or if they're going to be applied in Australia.

"I think we'd have to look closely at it and understand what it would mean to our customers.

There would be other things that customers would ask about including what sort of quality and what sort of user experience.

Avaya's three other platinum partners in Australia are Dimension Data, NSC and 3D Networks. There are 17 platinum partners in the Asia Pacific.