As a tech journalist writing for a publication almost exclusively focused on the local ICT industry, I was a little disappointed not to have met with Avaya Ireland’s sales director, John Sharpe, while attending the company’s bi-annual business partner forum in Barcelona last October.
The forum was interesting enough and Avaya EMEA officials I spoke to there were very helpful and courteous, but few of them knew very much about what is happening in Ireland. I was told Sharpe would be there and the PR guys and gals earnestly searched for him, not realising that a minor company crisis back in Dublin had prevented him from the making the journey at the last minute.
Apologising profusely about this when we finally met up in Dublin last month, Sharpe said he was disappointed not to have gone. He wouldn’t divulge what exactly it was that kept him to these shores, but it is possibly reassuring to know that resolving a problem at home took greater priority for him than attending a key sales event in his company’s calendar.
As sales director, Sharpe also holds overall responsibility for business partner relations in Ireland for both the Enterprise Communications Group (ECG), which has a multi-channel strategy, and the Small and Medium Business Systems (SMBS), which works on a completely indirect distribution model.
Judging from the language used by Avaya officials at the Barcelona forum, the company is looking to push more of its business indirect and is looking to data distributors and VARs to do so. Indeed, one of the more interesting facts to emerge from the forum is that 3 per cent of the company’s channel revenues in EMEA are ploughed back into its business partner programme for the region. When you consider that 70 per cent of the company’s overall revenues come from the indirect channel in EMEA, this clearly represents a considerable investment.
Improved partner programme
The forum also announced details of an enhanced partner programme, including a new certification ‘calculator’ tool that adds up the number of points a business partner can accrue and depicts their certification status on a single page of the Avaya partner extranet.
‘It’s about the recognition as much as the financial rewards,’ said Sharpe. ‘The certification calculator allows them to view on one page throughout their programme as to how certified they are in the different areas that are mentioned. They are able to skill up and improve if they are down in one area.’
Resellers will be allocated a number of points according to six different areas of skills: sales, product authorisation, customer service, marketing support, customer satisfaction and professional services. ‘No more than 35 per cent of the allocation of points may come from any one area,’ he said. ‘That is quite simply to ensure the breadth and balance of skills.’
Other improvements for business partners include a more accessible marketing fund and entry to Avaya University, Avaya’s training organisation that provides on and offline training courses to boost professional and technical knowledge. Candidates are offered self-testing programmes online that act as practise examinations.
Since its inception as a spin off from Lucent Technologies in October 2000, Avaya has gradually ramped up its indirect channel in Ireland. Two years ago, it had in place an indirect fulfilment scheme through which it supplied large accounts directly, but used resellers or integration firms to provide additional services.
Irish distributors
The next key phase, according to Sharpe, will be in shortly appointing either one or two Irish-based distributors that will supply both the ECG and SMBS products to the channel. At the moment, the SMBS products are distributed by UK-based distributor Crane, a situation Sharpe acknowledged was ‘not ideal’ as it effectively means the company has no ‘feet on the ground’ for SMBS in Ireland. The company also works with Ingram Micro and WestCon.
The combination of ECG’s multi-channel strategy and the small size of the Irish enterprise market dictate a fairly finite number of business partners in this space, said Sharpe. These would include Esat BT, Allnet and IBM.
‘By the nature of the ECG, we would have fewer business partners than in other countries because of the size of the country, so we would be more selective about who to work with.’
Avaya Ireland would also have inherited Avaya UK’s business partners who have set up small offices in Ireland. ‘Through that inheritance and own organic development, we have a business partner channel that probably accounts for 60 per cent of our revenues.’
Track record
Sharpe himself joined Avaya just over a year ago with an impressive 18-year track record working in both the systems and telco business with a variety of firms, including Plessey Communications, US Sprint, Cable & Wireless, Worldcom and Formus. He also spent two years running his own business before joining Avaya.
‘The last three years have been the toughest in the 18 years I’ve been in the industry,’ he declares.
It was certainly a difficult birthing period for Avaya three years ago when it was split off from Lucent, itself a spin-off from Bell Labs and before that from AT&T. Its future did not look as assured as it does now as the company was loaded with debt and its product line seemed to consist of old telecoms equipment.
Since then, the company has modernised its product range and, like close competitors Nortel and Cisco, is making a big play for the IP convergence market, and in order to reach this market, resellers will play a vital role.
‘We are in this new territory of convergence where our business partners can design, build and support converged networks and all the networks complications that go with it.’
‘We’re looking to our business partners to boost their skills so that they can advise clients on the importance of convergence.’ Resellers are being advised about skilling-up into new areas of expertise on the IP telephony products and applications that make up complete systems, Sharpe said.
Convergence complexities
However, he doesn’t foresee a point in the short term where moving to a completely indirect model for ECG will come about. ‘Its important that Avaya as an organisation and its channels are aware of the complexities associated with convergence. To just hand off the responsibility to solve those complexities solely to the channel would be completely inappropriate.’
Sharpe says Avaya would assess potential resellers regardless of whether they come from a voice or data background, but is more interested in their value-added application development and integration skills than their capacities as ‘box shifters’.
Addressing the question of whether Avaya would consider itself ‘hands on’ or ‘hands off’ in its approach to working with partners, Sharpe says its difficult to design an actual framework that allows business partners to delve into an area that is appropriate to them.
‘We’re very hands on in working with our business partners to ensure that they have access to all the support we can offer them and that which they might need. It’s up to them to choose what they want. But we do monitor their development, in future through the certification calculator, and allow them to monitor their own progress. It’s not down their throats, but its very comprehensive, so in that sense it’s about as hands on as we would want.’
‘We do have situations where business partners do go after the same contracts, but we would support them all equitably. It’s about competitiveness rather than conflict.’
Sharpe insists that there is very little in Avaya’s product portfolio that can be classified as commodities. ‘Support services and professional services are a big part of Avaya now and all of these are available through the channel.’
Joining up the network dots
Key areas of product focus for Avaya are in multimedia contact centres and supporting professional services. Unified communications is another area that ties in with the company’s fixation on converging old and new technologies. Products in this area enable the merging of mobile and fixed line numbers, wireless access to corporate LANs, and integration of fixed line features like call conferencing, messaging, scheduling and directories.
Avaya recently sold its Connectivity Solutions (ACS) business, which included a 190-strong manufacturing operation in Bray, Co. Wicklow, to US cabling company Commscope. Sharpe said the business was recently deemed as a non-core business for Avaya, hence the sale. Approximately 2000 people worked for ACS worldwide.
Sharpe is optimistic about the prospects in the Irish market for 2004, during which he foresees a further unfreezing of ICT budgets. The banking and government sectors look set to provide the biggest growth in Avaya revenues here, he predicts.
01/03/04
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