Avaya Global Services Targets Growth in Asia Pacific

MALAYSIA, Tuesday, 19 May 2009 - Avaya, the global leader in enterprise communications, recently released a number of major services initiatives aimed at growing its services business in Asia Pacific, via Avaya Global Services (AGS) and its expanding channel partner community. Avaya has significantly enhanced the suite of value added services to its customers in Asia Pacific in line with the global objectives of growing the services business. The initiatives are specifically aimed at helping customers reduce operational costs, through infrastructure centralization, mobility and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their employees.

Chris Cheng, a 24-year industry veteran who has led the growth charge as Head of AGS in Asia Pacific since October, has concentrated the regional services teams on business development, customer advocacy and business user focus. Cheng brings significant experience in the services industry including 20 years of services experience in the Asia-Pacific IT industry. Previously, Cheng worked for Nokia and IBM where he held a variety of senior leadership positions in services including application management services, outsourcing infrastructure services, hosting, and strategic outsourcing and managed operations.

On his services strategy in APAC, Chris Cheng said “We have made significant and strategic investments in APAC while aligning ourselves for growth. Fundamentally, if you want to sell business solution technology to customers today, you must substantiate the investment with measurable business returns. At AGS, we have the best people, processes and tools to analyse every aspect of our customer’s communication environment, aligning solutions to their business needs, then implement them and manage the environment in the most cost-effective manner. By providing upfront consulting, professional services and full service ongoing management of the environment across multiple countries in APAC, we are putting our ‘skin in the game’ and delivering business value with measurable returns to our customers.”

Cheng added “AGS has broad spectrum of new and exciting offers that bring immediate value to our customers – from simple IP Telephony readiness tools, easy to implement contact centre focused packaged applications, such as our AgentMap® software and desktop wallboards – to the most complex consulting and integration solutions, including Interactive Voice Recognition, Voice Portal, Interactive Customer Routing (ICR) and now Avaya Aura™.”

The new Global Services offer portfolio is built around the customer’s communications life cycle. The Planning and Design area includes the newly released Strategic Communications Consulting, a comprehensive, proactive consulting program that drives to the core of the customer’s business issues providing immediate returns on existing and potential customer technology investments through better use of the Avaya communications solutions.

AGS is involved in planning, designing, integrating, supporting and managing solutions for Avaya customers. It comprises of Avaya Professional Services, Avaya Operations Services and Global Support Services. Avaya Global Support Services has been the key valued services enjoyed by Avaya customers and channel partners in the past, but now Avaya is looking to expanding these services with existing and new partners to enhance the range of services and launch a full service offer suite.

Opening up the Market for Growth

One of the major changes Avaya made in the past year is to adopt a broad channel strategy that ensures consistency in delivering a high level of service to all its customers. In the same vein, AGS in APAC has launched a comprehensive online Partner Services Navigator designed to ensure engagement simplification and increase collaboration with its channel partners guaranteeing they have the right tools, intelligence and programs to offer to their customers delivering consistency and increased consideration. The Partner Services Navigator, combined with a focus on partner enablement aligns with the new channel strategy and sets the foundation for channel growth in the APAC region.

This initiative will also provide an opportunity for channel partners to grow their business capabilities and exposure alongside Avaya. The strategy is to work with system integrators as well as service providers to ensure that the customer gets the optimum solution.

Zeroing In on Excellence

As one of the key parameters to adding value to its customers, Avaya has established Centres of Excellence at Pune and Hyderabad in India. These centres house teams of specialist consultants that help understand the needs of business users by specific industry verticals and develop Avaya solutions using global best practice delivery. The other APAC support and development centre in Dalian, China continues to grow as Avaya adds significantly more support functions and services at the centre. Also, the Avaya Professional Services in APAC is being aligned with the Centres of Excellence. For example, for the Hospitality vertical, Avaya Global Services has tailored specific solutions that include call accounting and property management interfaces, PDA solutions for staff or the hotel contact centre system. The centres analyse best practices across industry verticals and apply these to offer cost-competitive, high-value solutions to its customers.

New Applications Development

Avaya Global Services is leveraging its industry expertise and experience to develop integrated applications that add direct value to its customers. As Cheng mentions above one application is AgentMap® which can be easily integrated to Avaya contact centre solutions. AgentMap®, provides the contact centre supervisors a customizable seat-layout view of agents’ real-time status through colour codes, icons and labels.

Industry Recognition

Avaya Global Services has been extremely successful in North America. It was awarded certification under the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Technology Service and Support (CTSS) Program (sm), one of the technology industry's highest recognitions. The certification acknowledged Avaya's excellence in delivering outstanding service and support, a distinction held currently by only three other companies.

Communications as a Service

AGS will extend its expertise to provide consulting and professional services to Avaya Aura™ and Intelligent Customer Routing (ICR) customers in Asia Pacific. Avaya Aura is a recently launched Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based communications architecture which integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-modal businesses on an open platform. Avaya ICR is Avaya’s revolutionary contact centre solution, which is also based on an open platform technology, designed to help businesses enhance customer experiences while improving efficiencies and cost savings in their contact centre operations.

The service offerings provided by to the customer begins with a situational assessment of the communications infrastructure on the actual design, integration and subsequent management of the revamped system. These services are designed to ensure customers that their Avaya Aura™ and Avaya ICR are designed, and implemented, in a manner that ensures alignment with key business requirements whilst minimizing risks, maximizes their return on investment (ROI) and minimising total cost of ownership (TCO).