Avaya Unveils New Services

The vendor plans to debut the "codified," productized services, which will be available through distribution, in June. About 90 days later, it will make available wholesale professional services such as network assessments, said Louis D'Ambrosio, group vice president of global sales, channels and marketing at Avaya, last week at the Catalyst Telecom Convergence Connection 2005 conference in Hilton Head Island, S.C.

"Some partners prefer to have services and the full solution on their books. For them, the wholesale model is more appropriate," he said.

Avaya, Basking Ridge, N.J., will continue to pay a fee to partners that act as agents in representing Avaya services and to encourage partners to offer their own services where they see fit, D'Ambrosio said. By taking the new wholesale services onto their books, partners will be able to resell the services at whatever markup they choose, he said.

"You can set your own margins," said John Gassert, service manager at PaeTec Communications, a communications VAR in Rochester, N.Y.

The services could help fill gaps in solution providers' portfolios, said John Black, president of Catalyst Telecom, the Avaya-focused arm of specialty distributor ScanSource, Greenville, S.C. "Avaya is building services that you might not have the bandwidth or investment dollars to build and selling them wholesale," Black said, during a keynote at last week's conference.

Some partners said Avaya has been sending mixed messages about services opportunities for its channel. "For years, they had told resellers to build their own services and then they tell us to use theirs. Now they're saying that since we have services practices, [there's room for both]," said Jeff Hiebert, CEO of ROI Networks, a solution provider in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

He said some of the most lucrative opportunities include a mix of partner- and Avaya-provided services, where solution providers act as project managers and bring together all the necessary service pieces.

The new offerings are part of several steps Avaya is taking to help increase channel sales and improve partner relations, D'Ambrosio said. Another step is the planned June rollout of the Avaya eDemand Program, a closed-loop lead-generation effort, he said.

To start, partners can access leads in their geographies through the eDemand program on a first-come, first-served basis. "That partner and the salespeople who are actually driving that lead are tracked on their productivity, and then as future leads come in, that will be one of the influencing factors in terms of the distribution of leads," D'Ambrosio said.

Avaya also continues to refine the segmented go-to-market strategy it rolled out last year. Under the strategy, Avaya primarily serves its top 250 accounts directly and leads with channel partners for accounts below that.

D'Ambrosio admits some Avaya field personnel have been slow to make the transition and pledged to help improve behavior in the field. Avaya's direct-sales force receives channel-neutral to pro-channel compensation on indirect deals, depending on the size of the account, the size of the partner and the services sold, he said.