24 March 2008
by Alex Scroxton
Business communications vendor Avaya has insisted its partners have nothing to fear after it unveiled what it claims is the industry’s most affordable unified comms (UC) software systems, designed to be priced at under £49 per desk.
According to the firm, this undercuts competitors by as much as 60 per cent in some cases.
Competitors that might have something to lose from lower prices said the move did not concern them. One remarked he did not see "a downward trend on UC".
"We would rather wait and see than give a kneejerk reaction," he said. "And right now our solutions are selling like hot cakes."
Jirina Yates, Avaya’s director of solutions marketing, said that the low price should not affect margins for the channel.
"I don’t think any vendor has the luxury of exclusivity with its resellers anymore, so the simpler we make it for them [Avaya’s partners] the more likely they are to sell our solutions," she said.
"Since the package is pre-defined for them, the configuration time for the partner is shrunk to very little, and on the services side they can resell Avaya’s services, or become certified to provide their own with support at the tier-3 or tier-4 level."
Yates and Avaya solutions marketing manager Chris Barrow said that the £49-a-head price formed a base level onto which extras, such as handsets or video capability, could be added.
"It gives all the functionality that we believe satisfies the needs of a teleworker, but it doesn’t stop there," Barrow said.
He said the basic solution, which is formed of a raft of new products including a new intelligent presence server, would remove the risk of the package going out of date when the next piece of kit was released, giving end-users the ability to go back to partners for additional upgrades.
