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VIRTUALISATION Aastra aims to shake up Aussie enterprise telephony market
VIRTUALISATION Aastra aims to shake up Aussie enterprise telephony market | Aastra aims to shake up Aussie enterprise telephony market |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 28 August 2008 | |
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Co-CEO Tony Shen, on a visit to Australia, told iTWire that the Ericsson way had been relatively hands off, devolving a great deal of responsibility for product promotion and sales to individual channel partners and managing these remotely from the head office in Sweden. The Aastra way is to support them with an in-country team that will have direct touch with end customers (but not direct sales). To this end, Aastra acquired the half dozen Ericsson staff in Australia involved in the enterprise comms business and pans to double this number. "Ericsson have done a very good job here and build up a large installed base. We believe we can revitalise that and grow the business with the Aastra product portfolio and the former Ericsson portfolio," Shen said. "We are decentralising and putting back the ownership of the business to the local entity," He added "We are just starting out we have most of the team we are up to 10 people but we wil be looking for more. We have an office." This team includes Nick Dyer, Aastra’s regional director and Kylie Savage, general manager Australia. In terms of product, Shen said that all the existing Ericsson product would be renamed Aastra but model identifiers would be retained, so for example the Ericsson MD110 is now the Aastra MD110. Prior to acquiring the Ericsson business, Aastra's main business in Australia was to supply the P-phone to Telstra, a digital IP centrex phon that works with a Nortel switch, used by Telstra to support its IP centrex service. Interviewed by Ovum earlier this year, Shen said Aastra aimed to be "a top five global IP telephony vendor". He was unable to provide iTWire with any estimate of Ericsson's share of the Australian IP telephony market. However, this is likely to be substantial given that the main channel partner is Telstra Business Systems. CONTINUED |
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