Aastra aims to shake up Aussie enterprise telephony market

by Stuart Corner

Thursday, 28 August 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Australia's already highly competitive market for enterprise telephony systems looks set to become even more so as Canadian company Aastra, which has bought Ericsson's enterprise telephony business, moves to ramp up its operations in Australia and revitalise relationships with former Ericsson channel partners. The Aastra name that is not well known in Australia. Nor, until recently, did the company have much of a presence in terms of either people or product. That all changed in May when it became the owner, for $A111m, of Ericsson's enterprise telephony business globally. It is now in the process of refashioning that business: a process which will mean a big change in the way it is run. 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 << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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