Avaya claims Nortel channel happily assimilated

Avaya's Australian managing director has claimed that almost all former Nortel partners had finished recertifying ahead of a September deadline and were "excited" about becoming Avaya partners.

"There haven't been any more challenges than you would anticipate in moving from one organisation to another," said Rob Wells, managing director at Avaya Australia."The best test we have is how well the business is growing and we're very pleased that we haven't lost a partner along the way.

"All the Nortel partners are Avaya partners, and they're excited about it."

Wells acknowledged that a transition in June to a different maintenance service model had "worried" some partners but added that the new model had been launched by Nortel prior to the acquisition.

"The change was communicated from November onward from Nortel, and we closed that down last quarter and then it was sorted out," said Wells. "What you're hearing there is people worrying about change."

Wells' comments came on the heels of last week's update to the company's flagship telephony product, Aura, and the release of the SIP-based Avaya Contact Centre. Another 14 telephony products were also included in the release.

The Contact Centre product was built to handle multimedia.

"It can do IM, email, webmail, text or video. It's handled in exactly the same way in terms of routing as if it was a voice call. That's very new," said Wells.

"They're usually bolt on in other systems and not well integrated with the core call centre architecture."

Customers could call an insurance company to make a claim in a car accident and send in video of the damage on the spot, said Wells.

The call centre was "a very important market for us," said Wells. With Nortel's share, Avaya now has 53 percent of the contact centre market globally.  "The Nortel acquisition gave us critical mass in terms of Australia and New Zealand and that changed the dynamic for us in this marketplace."

Avaya is predicting that revenue from the Asia Pacific market will double in size in three years. 

Avaya completed its acquisition of Nortel in last December.