'Recession Polarises Market; Customers Exhibit Flight To Quality'

Anil Nair, president, Avaya GlobalConnect talks to Biztech2.0 about security concerns in a converged network and the future of Unified Communications.

Avaya GlobalConnect has won the Market Leadership award for Enterprise IP Telephony and the same award for ACD and CTI as well. How has this award given a boost to the company?

Recognition based on such holistic research endorses our leadership. The fact that we have received this award for seven years in a row, practically for every product category we operate in, indicates our consistency and commitment to the market. It also recognises the stability and scalability of our platforms and the value we create for customers, who use them.

Unified Communications (UC) is gaining traction in India. Could you please share current market conditions? What trends do you see emerging in this space?

Unified Communications (UC) will play a pivotal role for Indian businesses in the years to come. Contact Centres (CC) provide an application interface between an enterprise and its customers while IP telephony helps the enterprise to connect and engage its employees better. Unified Communication allows an individual access to business applications through the CC or an IPT interface using any channel (like voice, video, Web etc) and any device of his choice (mobile, landline, PDA, desktop, laptop etc).

It also helps customers and employees collaborate better. This increases the pace of business interactions substantially while reducing dependency on physical travel. For these reasons, UC can be a business accelerator with substantial ‘green’ benefits. These UC benefits will be of high relevance to a vast geography like India where cost of doing business and achieving penetration is high. Now when it comes to adoption, the determining factor is the ability to accelerate business (business benefits) and not the mere ability to ‘use-any-channel-any-device’.

This is the reason Indian businesses are not investing in UC as a ’technology’ but will continue to invest in its business benefits especially in turbulent times. Whoever can deeply resonate with the underlying business need of communication is more likely to succeed. While it is difficult to foresee the future five years down the line, it will quite probably be mature in terms of UC applications and will encompass the SME and Home User segment as well, across a wider range of platforms, devices and appliances.

What are the major security concerns in a converged network? What methods can be adopted to overcome them?

Converged networks will have to balance the needs of business application integration, QoS (quality of service), scale and security across real-time (like voice, video) and non-real time (data, Web, chat, IM, e-mail) applications. These networks would need to work using open standards and hardened operating systems to avoid hacking. This will ensure secure access to authentic users. This is the most basic security issue with converged networks today. Apart from offering ‘secure access’, security of these converged networks will depend on the ability to offer a high degree of availability, reliability, resiliency, scalability and monitoring facility.

The key is to design and implement converged networks that can handle scale and are tuned to highest QoS for real-time interactions and to apply the security framework not only at the device level but architecturally as well.

How far has Avaya’s verticalisation strategy reached and how has this been enhanced in the last one year?

Avaya GlobalConnect’s verticalisation strategy is all about helping customers ‘accelerate business’ by addressing pain points. This strategy also helps us to gain significant revenues from sectors like BFSI and outsourcing (IT/BPO) even in the middle of a slowdown. Last year, sectors dependent on domestic growth like insurance, service providers, FMCG, government, education, healthcare, hospitality, retail and manufacturing gained substantial traction thanks to the acceleration benefits we offer. Last year, we also extended our customer studio facility (where customers can experience industry-specific solutions) to two more cities that is, Bangalore and Gurgaon.

What is the latest large-scale deployment that the company has done? Has the recession affected the company’s projects in anyway?

During a ‘slowdown’, our solutions actually witness higher traction as they help accelerate business at a relatively lesser cost and serve as a force multiplier. Another interesting trend is that recession polarises the market, with customers exhibiting a ‘flight to quality’. This means that customers don’t cut costs summarily in recession. They defer decisions; they become prudent but would eventually invest in ‘best-in-class’ solutions offering competitive prices. Customers do not wish to take chances with their end consumers in these turbulent times.

As for big projects, while we were involved in several large implementations across industries, what is more important to us is the business impact it had for customers.

What exciting projects is Avaya looking at in 2009?

While we remain committed to customers across verticals and will continue to help them accelerate business, I am truly excited to take this to the next level with ‘Idea-to-Impact’ in 2009 and as a standard practice going forward. Idea-to-Impact is about co-creating solutions across our value chain and then hand holding and helping customers realise the benefits of these solutions even after the deployment on a continuous basis.