BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION - CHANGE LEADER IN FOCUS
www.comms-dealer.com Avaya’s set for changes
Avaya’s mission to lead its channel partners into a new world of
communications is truly transformational. The man leading this change is Niall Anderson, incoming Regional Channel Director for UK & Ireland, who gave Comms Dealer’s Nigel Sergent an insight into Avaya’s partner strategy for the year ahead.
collaborative working and high margin enterprise customer opportunities could finally see the end of the American giant’s support for SME centric traditional telephone system resellers. Anderson, who is an engineer by trade but a salesperson at heart, is confident that his passion for leadership will inspire resellers looking to embrace opportunities in the transforming business communications market. Over time, the new Regional Channel Director for UK & Ireland has to delicately persuade resellers that do not want to join Avaya on its journey into the world of virtualisation, SaaS and web based collaboration – all now at the forefront of corporate customers’ minds – to move aside and make room for partners willing to transform their business models.
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Anderson is pledging Avaya’s full support to resellers that want to get on board and says the process will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
a channel die hard. He started his working life as an apprentice in the defence industry, ultimately attaining senior and board level leadership positions with the likes of data distributor Anixter, Sun Microsystems, Orange Business Services and Global Crossing. He says his commercial passions are for pragmatic strategy, outstanding people leadership and deep customer and partner relationships.
vaya’s sharpened focus on server- based managed services,
“We are on an evolutionary path as we grow our business and I am here to drive that transformation harder and a bit faster. I’ll be looking to see how we can improve things and do things differently, but I do not see wholesale changes. I think a lot of our partners are already on the journey with us. There will be some refining and some fine tuning of what we have got. We have an opportunity to explore and gain greater market share so we need to make sure the partner landscape can support the channel’s aspirations and ours.”
Without putting too finer point on it, this indicates that Anderson is preparing for some measured dead wood pruning via a competence and compliance exercise. “We have to move away from being a volume based business to being value based, and some of that value comes from perhaps smaller partners that don’t do the volume of some of the bigger partners, but have something unique that is of value to us. It could be the way they take our products to market or the market they take
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“I have 25-plus years serving end user markets so I have a good
Niall Anderson: “Avaya is on a journey and knows where it wants to go”
our products to. So we will see those partnerships continue. Clearly, we would like to see our partners selling all our products and meet the accreditation and compliance levels to do that. This is a big ask for some partners but with others it’s what they do and it’s what they want to do. As we seek to evolve the channel I think we will lose some of the smaller partners or serve them in a different way.”
Avaya is staking its future on its partner’s appetite to embrace change and adapt to new business models. With 90 per cent of its business running through the channel, Avaya clearly only wants committed players on the team bus. Anderson believes end users are buying into managed services – features and functions delivered to a desktop
– and understand the way that is monetised. “The end user market space is used to having a utility offer,” he commented. “That is the challenge all technology providers face, to be able to provide managed services in an effective and efficient way and, from a financial perspective, allow that transition to occur. For resellers it’s a different model from providing project based solutions where you sell, install and take the revenue to a pay as you go platform solution. It’s the way the market is going and it’s gathering pace. The provision of server based hosted solutions is the journey we are on.”
Tellingly, Avaya recruited Anderson, a seasoned ICT professional with end user sales experience to fill the newly created Head of Partners role rather than
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understanding of what the enterprise and government sectors need,” Anderson commented. “Customers are migrating from older technology to reap the benefits new technology brings. This requires our partners to evolve and specialise with us. It’s our role to help them make the transition. It’s the only way we are going to grow our business. We are of course constrained by market conditions. It’s still a challenge out there, but the size of the opportunity ahead of us is there and it’s up to us to get the most out of that opportunity.
“Avaya is on a journey and knows where it wants to go. The messages we have been putting out are around applications and user experience and they are two different things. Some of our partners will embrace that and help us drive that growth. Some will say it’s not for them and do what they have continued to do in the past. Selling new products will be different as we evolve our own value to the end user market space.”
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