The focus of last week's Asia-Pacific partner conference in Beijing was almost entirely weighted towards unified communications and contact centre (UCC) technology.
Todd Abbot, senior vice president of sales and president of field operations for Avaya, said that "priority number one" for the vendor was to be "thought leaders" in UCC.
However, he stressed that the vendor is not walking away from the networking (data) business.
"When you do the maths, we paid US$250 million to US$300 million for the [Nortel] data business. We are absolutely investing in the data business; it is a key part of our portfolio and we are not going to shy away from the battles," said Abbot.
"We want to win and compete in the data business, make no mistake about it."
Abbot said Avaya would not compete in every networking market. The vendor was not going to manufacture high-end routers for telecommunications backbones.
"We don't need to be in that space. We will compete vigorously for Layer 2 and Layer 3 but not at the expense of losing the UCC business," said Abbot.
He admitted that this might mean running Avaya's voice products on top of Cisco and Juniper, and that Avaya resellers had to decide on a sale-by-sale basis whether to push the data portfolio alongside the voice products.
Dr Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of global communications solutions said that under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Nortel had been constrained in investing in product innovation and development.
Since the acquisition Avaya had decided on three areas in the data portfolio that were really important, said Dr Baratz: Core modular switching for the data centre, "where Nortel has best in class reliability, performance and scaliabiity"; wireless, "which will have very interesting synergies with the real-time communications portfolio"; and integrated services and router solutions, said Dr Baratz.
The road ahead for Nortel partners
Avaya had two main objectives during the conference; to woo as many Nortel partners into joining the vendor, and to reveal a product roadmap that would inspire both camps. Many turned up to listen to the pitch - the audience was quadruple the numbers for previous years.
Jeremy Butt, vice president of channels, said Nortel partners accounted for half the audience and that Avaya had doubled its Asia Pacific resellers in the last year.
Butt directly addressed Nortel partners on several occasions.
"When we acquired Nortel we didn't acquire you; you're independent businesses," said Butt. "We need to win each other's trust."
Butt's message was that Avaya would ensure Nortel partners could continue business as usual while they prepared to the transition to the revised Avaya roadmap.
"Continue ordering who you order from," said Butt. He promised the vendor wouldn't change the existing supply chains, but that they would amalgamate over time. This amalgamation, however, could happen faster than advertised, according to reports from Australian distributors.
Avaya started working on a global pricing model eight months ago. However, it was proving difficult to complete and would be rolled out in South America, a low-growth market, first.
"Relax, you're not going to be test-bed dummies," said Butt. "Price change is potentially business disruptive and we are not going to do anything that will potentially stop the business."
Avaya overhauled its accreditation with a simpler regime that nodded to Nortel's skill set. The vendor has added a Data Expert badge alongside its SME Expert and Services Expert badges.
The partner competency model has been slashed from 97 training tracks to 13, and the time to complete training has been reduced by 50 percent by removing repetition. The courses had been rearranged to focus on selling solutions; 75 percent were solutions based and the rest focused on products.
Heritage Nortel support has been unified into the Avaya support structure.
Chris Formant, senior vice president and president of global services, admitted that Avaya has had "a less than efficient parts and distribution" [operation].
One reseller stood up at the conference and asked about shortages that had slowed sales for two consecutive quarters last year. The senior executive answered that the shortages were industry-wide; manufacturers were always the last to respond to economic recovery, and a critical supplier had been unable to supply server companies such as Dell, HP and IBM, as well as Avaya.
The new plan was to move to a four-hour, 24/7 parts delivery to anywhere in the world. Quoting has been simplified to five working days.
Formant revealed that Avaya's managed services portfolio would come in two flavours. Smaller resellers could take up a private label, multi-vendor offer where the reseller initiated the lead and then called in Avaya Operations Services, in return for a profitable annuity stream.
The second option was full co-delivery. Select partners could support Avaya solutions using their own tools, processes and offers, said Formant.
Avaya has set up global advisory councils for resellers and distributors, held every six months, to act as a formal feedback channel. While not the first vendor to do so, it has taken the opportunity for dialogue seriously, said Nick Verykios, sales and marketing director from Distributor Central, an Avaya distributor.
"In October the panel was particularly impressive. We rolled up our sleeves and nutted out a channel program and didn't stop until we had finished it," said Verykios. He added that the channel program released this week was essentially the result of this process.
"This was done in consultation with the channel so if anyone has a problem with it," Verykios ended the sentence with a shrug. "It's very well thought out. Jeremy Butt has done an amazing job at bringing a whole lot of complexities [and] making it simple."
Sholto travelled to the Avaya's Asia Pacific Partner Conference in Beijing as a guest of Avaya.
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