It was the pandemic that accelerated the digital transformation journey for many organizations. Be it business operation or customer experience, there has been a paradigm shift both in terms of how the services are consumed and how they are delivered. Avaya, a leader in the solution-oriented space, recognizes the potential of India’s digital transformation drive and has been focusing on rallying its channel partner community with the latest innovations to accelerate business growth. We had the opportunity to interact with Mr. Fadi Moubarak, VP – Channels for Avaya International, who shared insights on the company’s initiatives for the channel partner community and growth strategy for the Indian market.
Here’s the excerpt from the interaction:
The pandemic period accelerated digital transformation drives for many organizations, and also several emerging technologies started becoming mainstream. How is Avaya engaging channel partners in the segment and keeping them abreast with the new technologies and solutions?
Due to COVID restrictions, we’ve been away from our partner for face-to-face enablement for the last two-three years. So now we are launching a series of enablement activities, whether they are sales, whether they are conferences for customers, whether they are hands-on training on these products – so that the skills out there could be refreshed. Lots of our partners also have hired new people or we’ve seen churn in their resources community. So it’s becoming very important now to get to these face-to-face enablement activities. So by following a solution approach, where we, with our ecosystem partners, conduct these training sessions. And of course, like in every controlled engagement, the first few deals, our partners can rely on us to be present in the implementation until they pick up the skills, and then they can eventually do it on their own. Also, what’s helping partners a lot is the fact that in the cloud world because the solutions are deployed on the cloud, it’s about really some customization and accelerating the consumption. The partner skills have to be focused more on the technical integration skills and business skills, in the sense of understanding the customer, business, and business processes very well. So that we help the customer achieve the objective they’re looking for, once they start consuming our solutions from Avaya and the ecosystem.
Tell us about the latest technologies that you are focusing on for the Indian enterprises, and are you targeting MSMEs?
We’ve recently launched our OneCloud Public CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) solution. It’s based on the Zoom infrastructure, which is totally in the cloud. We’ve also launched a mid-market lower enterprise, SMB, and local CCaaS solution, and we already have 12 customers live on it for the local market in India and some other local markets around the region. So we’ve taken the approach of really addressing the opportunity most efficiently and in the fastest manner possible through a set of complementing solutions, the two solutions have different suitability for different customers, they don’t compete, they complement each other. And these are kind of the push for us now, with our partners. We have a lot of existing customers now that are looking to expand their customer experience applications by introducing new technologies like AI, speech analytics, virtual assistants, and things like that. So we’re enabling and working with our partners to train them on the opportunity and doing with them a little bit of planning and analytics on our customer base. We then go back to those customers and offer these add-ons to the existing environment so that they benefit from the new solutions out there.
From our perspective, what do you want to say about the potential of the Indian market and Indian enterprises for Avaya?
Historically, we’ve always been very strong in India, we have our base in the top banks, and top airlines – our technology is everywhere. And now recently, we had great success with this Smart Cities initiative. So we work a lot. I think we can refer to UP Dial and more National Emergency Services (MP Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, all of them are on the replica of 911 and 112). So, you can say India is the biggest, maybe in the top three in the next three to five years. Whether it’s a large, small, or medium enterprise, I think all Indian enterprises are very innovative, vibrant, and dynamic. So, we have to be equally agile and dynamic to meet their requirements and work at their pace to serve their objectives. So that’s an exercise that Avaya alone cannot do. Our local partner community is important because theye’re close to the customers, and their input and their efforts with us are essential to be able to serve this vibrant and successful market that, you know, everybody talks about.
Click here to view the interview with Fadi Moubarak.
