Undeterred by the struggle with its huge debt and recent decision to file for a chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and suspend plans to sell call center business after reviewing potential offers, the global communication firm Avaya focus on India remains unabated. The company has increased its reach and coverage in mid-market segment. Last year, it acquired more than 400 new customers and it is betting big on the India’s digital push and Smart Cities projects.
“In 2016, we saw both Avaya and market rapidly transforming. From a market perspective, we saw lot of traction in the government digitisation strategies, more investment in technology in mid-market and commercial enterprise space and focus on improving customer engagement experience,” says managing director of Avaya – India and SAARC Vishal Agrawal. “With respect to Avaya in India, we worked in many directions. We launched new products such as Equinox and Oceana which are closer to the market reality. In terms of the mid-market, we increased our reach and coverage, and acquired more than 400 new customers last year,” he says.
About 15-20 per cent of the California-based firm’s India revenues comes from government projects. The company expect this number to go up to “30 per cent” in the next 18 to 24 months with its renewed focus on government businesses and some recent project wins in this segment.
While it has recently implemented ‘UP Dial 100’ program with the Uttar Pradesh Police that helps the latter to transform its call centre response management, it is working with government of Madhya Pradesh on Dial 100 project as well as on emergency health response system. According to company officials, work is already in progress in two more states – Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. “Different states understand the scale and the efficiency of emergency response system. It will be the first wave of digitisation to reach out to the communities in distress and it is likely to be a high focus area for next 3-4 years in the country,” says Agrawal.
But above all, the most encouraging story for the company has been its three Research & Development Centres (R&D) spread across Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. The centres have significantly contributed to Avaya’s global R&D. “We do around 35-40 per cent developments out of India. Many of the product lines are owned by these centers and it continues to be a strategic location investment for Avaya,” says Agrawal, adding that globally around one third of the development work happens out of India. India is the second largest global center after USA for the company.
Avaya which has traversed from multi-site contact centers provider to unified communication firm to fabric connect pioneer, does not want to be known only as the company that makes the phone for the work desk of executives. It is slowly but steadily diversifying its offerings to include Artificial Intelligence. The company has started working on the concept of dynamic IVR and chatbots to replace basic mundane knowledge based queries where the human discretion is not required to resolve customer issues. “We can help customers with the Artificial Intelligence. We are working towards it to provide connectivity and world-class Artificial Intelligence tools,” he says.
On the question of its traditional competitors now diving into software defined systems. Will that have any impact on ‘software defined’ driven firm’s growths in India? Agrawal says that in the market there is a place for everyone and companies will continue to evolve. “We are aggregating the hardware where one can buy switches from any vendors and we provide the software,” he says, adding that the enterprises are looking for products which are open. “The era of having an EPABX or network or wireless and insulated architecture is gone,” concludes Agrawal.