Avaya Australia revamps channel strategy

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 01:13

IT Industry - Market

Avaya has appointed a new Australian distributer, Distribution Central, and expanded the role of its existing distributor, Avnet, as part of its global strategy aimed at increasing the percentage of is revenue coming from indirect sales.

Jeremy Butt, Avaya's vice president worldwide channels, told ITWire that in the US the direct/indirect revenue split was about 50:50. "Over the next three to four years we hope to get that to 85 percent through channels," he said, adding. "I would never expect to get to 100 percent because there will always be some very large customers who will want to deal direct."

Andy Hurt, regional director, channels for Avaya South Pacific (including Australia) said that in this region the percentage of sale through channels was "already closer to 85 percent."

He said that the main aim of the move had been to create a more uniform channel strategy across large and small enterprises. "We are transitioning our organisation to be a lot more channel-centric, to give us an expanded reach into system integrators and service providers...At the top end we had tier one business partners and a two tier approach at the bottom end through distribution, it was a bid of a mixed model." He added that "We have a small number of direct accounts that we will continue to do business with, mainly the Federal Government and high end enterprises."

In addition to its appointment of Distribution Central, Avaya has also expanded its relationship with Avnet, and Hurt said this move would give channel partners some choice as to who they dealt with. "In our search for the right partner we felt it was important to have choice for our business partners. It will give them different options for complementary products [to those supplied by Avaya]. Avnet have a good portfolio in the data space and Distribution Central are very strong in security but there will be some competitive tension in the market, and that's good."

He would not rule out the appointment of other distribution partners down the track. "I see this as a complementary partnership and will cover enough of the market to make it worthwhile in the short term but we are always looking for new avenues to explore and if these arrangements don't met our criteria we will be looking at other options."

Hurt said that, under the new arrangements "The partner certification levels we had are being maintained; we are not opening the floodgates to a whole lot of new channel partners, we are being very selective.

"We still take responsibility for channel management. The accountability of their success will still be linked to our channel account management, we won't be losing touch with them. If anything we will be increasing our resources to work with our channel partners."

He added "The channel partners will save costs because they will no longer have to ship goods in from Singapore or wherever they are made, the distributors will take that on."