Roy Wakim, Director, Avaya Networking APAC, talked to Prashant L Rao about the networking vendor’s push in the SMB space where it saw a shift to Gigabit Ethernet, consumption trends in the UC space, its Power over Ethernet product line and BYOD
Is demand for networking products in the mid-market growing faster than in the large enterprise?
It’s about where the SMBs are in the technology cycle. There’s been a shift to Gigabit Ethernet. Enterprises shifted to Gigabit Ethernet a long time ago. SMBs are three to four years behind on the adoption curve. Consequently, we are selling products with Gigabit functionality to this segment.
You have said in earlier interviews that Indian SMBs are moving from 10/100 to Gigabit Ethernet. Do you see the larger SMBs deploying 10 GbE in their data centers?
It’s too early for them to adopt 10 GbE. They don’t have the applications that need that kind of bandwidth. At this point, they are still making the transition to GbE.
Has the UC growth tapered off or is it still going strong? If it is, which are the industry verticals that are driving growth?
The action in UC is shifting away from BPOs and moving to hospitality, retail and manufacturing. BPOs took advantage of this technology at the beginning largely because of the soft client. Other industries waited till the price point was the same as that of the traditional technology and then they went in for the latest technology.
People buy UC based on business needs and requirements. The single number concept is popular in cases where companies want to track salespeople on the road.
Tell us about some of your recent product launches.
The ERS3500 is an SMB switch. There are 8/24 port variants. The 8 port product’s targeted at retail and hospitality. The 24 port switch is targeted at manufacturing and at driving UC adoption. The line up starts from $350 all the way up to $2,000 (list).
IP Office 8 gives a bit more of flexibility as you don’t need the chassis anymore. India still has a big uptake of analog, particularly in the Sub-50 user space. From 50 users up to 200, they start to adopt IP.
On the video front, the acquisition of RADVISION gave us access to software-based video conferencing technology. It’s easy to deploy; you send a link, download the app and start video conferencing. It’s also available on smartphones.
Where does mobility come into the picture?
Mobility comes in when a customer has multiple sites. It becomes rather handy when a company has three or more sites. On the video side, once you have multiple sites, it works well.
In South East Asia, small companies like to use video as they can see or show their product. Skype video is very popular there.
Carriers drive the change in behavior in the SMB segment. In ANZ and Hong Kong the carriers are driving SIP. In India, the carriers are still marketing leased lines.
Do you see Power over Ethernet catching on?
We just launched our PoE plus enabled products in India in June 2012.
In other countries, in retail or education they use lots of CCTV cameras. That and other devices that need IP connectivity make our eight port switch ideal for small businesses. Schools can use 8/16 port switches. With PoE plus, we will soon support laptops.
It’s all about managing power consumption as leaving a switch idle can also consume power. We consume about 25% less power than others in idle mode.
What’s your take on BYOD?
BYOD as a trend is more prevalent in the enterprise and it’s driven by CEOs/CFOs bringing their tablets to work. We cater to that with our identity management engine that interrogates the device down to the OS level and isolates it if required.
We are hearing quite a bit from other vendors about Software Defined Networking. What’s Avaya’s take on that?
We are driving the virtualization of the enterprise core. We have adopted Short Path Bridging or 802.1aq. We are approaching it from the application side. The network is there to cater to the application. The switch is becoming smart and application aware. It’s not just about QoS anymore.
