INTERVIEW
Avaya grows ToIP channel....
by Colombe Vergès
colombe.verges@
iteuropa.com
Channel Manager for Avaya in France, Edouard de Fonclare (right) talks to IT Europa about growing competitiveness in the French ToIP (Telephony over IP) market, and reasserts its 100% indirect strategy commitment with a stronger focus on regions and new partnerships with the main national integrators. ToIP is based on VoIP but it offers a rich range of services and applications....
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n line with Avaya’s global strategy which started with the arrival of VP Channel Worldwide, Jeremy Butt, Avaya France is strengthening its
channel and growing strongly in the ToIP market, but it is still quite weak in the region. “Avaya had an historical direct sales logic,
especially in France where it was more focused on the call centres market; but now we have the ambition to strongly grow our market share in the ToIP segment and to be able to go on these deals, it is absolutely essential to do it through indirect distribution networks, in order to have this lever- age notion and to win market share,” explains de Fonclare. “This doesn’t mean that we’re giving up the call
centres where we have a significant market share that we want to keep on developing also in an indirect logic, but we’ve started to empha- size particularly ToIP in the last 12 months.” Avaya will keep his few historical call centres big customers, which it provides in services too, but will go indirect on all new deals. To support its strategy, Avaya
has strengthened its sales teams and appointed a new Sales Director, Olivier Djan (above), reporting to President of Avaya France, Alexis Delb. Djan has taken the management of the ‘High Touch’ sales team, whose mission is to evangelise the accounts, and that is since the rap- prochement with ex-Nortel, since Olivier had this role at Nortel.
30 APR 2010
In order to do that, he will be assisted by sales
teams divided in three different sections: a first sales team in charge of the ‘Top Accounts’, corre- sponding to the 100 top French accounts; a second team for the public sector, especially the big state departments and institutions; and then two other ‘Premium’ teams, one ‘Premium Ile-de-France’ for the Paris region, and five ‘Premium region’ teams in order to be very close to the regional custom- ers. “This is a significant investment to increase our presence on the French market, whether on big accounts or big SMEs,” adds de Fonclare. Avaya is also strengthening its channel in France,
mainly by signing new partnership agreements with the main national systems integrators. Indeed, with the exception of biggest integrator Orange Business Services, with whom it’s been working for a long time, until six months ago, Avaya didn’t have national integrators. “If we want to be present on the ToIP mar- ket, it is absolutely necessary to get closer to the big national integrators, in addition to the regional integrators that address the SMB market and with whom we already work,” he explains. “So today, we’re really making a new deal, we’ve signed agree-
ments with Dimension Data, Spicom and Axient, and we’re putting in place a distribution partner and partner network much more consistent with our growth strategy in the French market.” Today, Avaya has become aware that it needs
to position itself for the big ToIP deals that it was often declining, and therefore was a little under-
distributed because of its double logic of direct sales and call centres. “But now, you’re going to see us in these big tenders we did not used to participate in because we weren’t able to offer competitive enough prices,” continues de Fonclare. With the big manufacturers present on the French market, the competition is fierce – characteristi- cally, France is the country that sees the cheapest price for the phone lines. “But today, we’re fully supported by our marketing teams, who have given us the go-ahead to align ourselves on a tariff point of view to be competitive on these deals.” “Avaya is really changing gear to better position
itself on the quality of both its products and its sales teams that have roughly doubled since the acquisition of Nortel,” concludes de Fonclare. “This has allowed me to be much closer to our existing and new partners, and I really believe in that notion of proximity with our partners’ business to inform them of our programmes and strategy but also to close the deals.” “Also, the days are over when we used to ask
our partners to invest in training certification pro- grammes before we see the business, so my strat- egy is to do business with the partners that want to go with us, and then we enter a training and cer- tification process. This is natural since they made margins on the deals they won with us.” “So I think it’s the opportunity for partners to
look at Avaya’s portfolio - really performing and aligned in terms of prices, so you can expect the French market to look at Avaya very closely in the coming months.”
www.avaya.com
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