Although contact center solutions represent the biggest part of Avaya’s revenues, the company aims to be recognized beyond that business, as an important player of the multibillion-dollar enterprise market for communication tools.
“Avaya moved from a firm that provides call center solutions to a much bigger spectrum, with focus on tools for enterprise sharing information and content management. And Avaya achieved that goal through a series of acquisitions, including Nortel Enterprise about two years ago,” Nelson Campelo, president for Avaya Brazil, told RCR Wireless News.
Since Nortel’s buyout, Avaya has invested nearly U.S. $600 million in research and development, mostly to work on integration tools and middleware to connect both portfolios. “The most difficult part of integration with Nortel Enterprise is gone, and now we are working to provide new solutions to the Brazilian market,” said Campelo, who has been leading the subsidiary for less than two months.
Previously, Campelo worked for eight years at Nokia Siemens Networks on global system integration and Latin America solutions. Now his challenge is to increase Avaya’s growth; the company’s goal is an increase of 15%. The Latin America region is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and the region’s progress is driven by Brazil, said John DiLullo, Avaya’s vice president of Americas international and Campelo’s boss.
DiLullo has been traveling throughout the region to understand countries’ needs. “Depending on the country, it is growing three, four times the gross domestic product (GDP). Brazil pushes it, but Peru, Chile and Colombia are doing well, too.”
The growth is based on three pillars: contact center solutions, unified communications and sharing information’s tools, and data portfolio solutions. “Companies around the globe, U.S. firms in particularly, are trying to do near-shore, so they are moving what they were used to do in India and bringing them more closely, due to the time zone difference. This boosts contact center solutions,” DiLullo said.
The contact center vertical continues to be important for Avaya, although the company is making a lot of efforts to grow in others areas. The segment employs a large number of people and faces continuous challenges of optimization. “Technology tools are extremely necessary and, aligned with innovation, make contact centers more efficient,” Campelo said.
To grow in the unified communications and enterprise tools for information-sharing and management, Avaya relies on working with resellers as well as telecoms operators. Brazilian carriers have been looking for aggregating information and communications technology services to offer to small and medium businesses through their enterprises units. Indeed, small and medium businesses have been Avaya’s focus for a while. The company says the segment is passing through a transformation toward IP, and those who have older analogic infrastructure might have to replace them.
However, to achieve this kind of customers Avaya has to expand geographically, something that would be impossible without resellers. “To reach (small and medium businesses), we need channels and partnership with carriers, because they already have capillarity,” Campelo said. Telefónica and CTBC are partners, and Campelo said that Avaya is talking with Oi, Embratel and Intelig to set a similar deal. “We believe that SMB could represent 20% of our revenues in the next two or three years. Today it is 10%.”
From Avaya’s perspective, the partnership could be a way to differentiate itself by providing small and medium businesses with a complete package of equipment, data and voice. In other words, operators could take advantage and add some value services to what they already provide, because voice and data could be considered a commodity.
The third pillar is related to Nortel Enterprise’s solutions that were integrated to Avaya’s portfolio. The global provider aims to be what the market calls a “one-stop shop” for enterprises. “Firms buy data solutions in many different ways, and we see a total integration from those solutions to our systems,” Campelo said.
However, Avaya still faces huge competition, mainly with Cisco. Asked how Avaya is preparing itself to compete with Cisco, Campelo emphasized that it is not a win-or-lose battle but a fight to see who gain more space: “The whole market is growing, and everyone likes to have options. We are a really good alternative for enterprises.”
Avaya also is focusing on providing its solutions as a service. Campelo said that many customers are demanding to manage their infrastructure. “So there is a space to occupy in terms of doing the technology infrastructure managing.”
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