Westcon backs Avaya UC range

Distributor Westcon is aiming to make Avaya VARs’ lives a little easier with its mid-market-focused unified communications programme.

The Accelerate programme, unveiled last month, will see Westcon bundling its own services and Avaya applications with the vendor’s IP telephony platform. Resellers will also be offered sales, pre-sales and technical services training, as well as white-label marketing material and assistance with telemarketing. Products and services will be available with zero per cent financing.

Power-over-Ethernet switching products from Extreme Networks and videoconferencing from Polycom will be bundled into product packages within six weeks.

Tim Brooks, UK general manager for Westcon Convergence, said: “The Avaya solution is fantastic in its breadth and depth, but that can cause complexity around solution design. We want to simplify the work the partner has to do.”

Paul Riordan, director of channel sales operations for Avaya, stressed that resellers had to court mid-market in a different way than both SMEs and larger enterprises.

“In the very large enterprise space, a lot of call centres are tied into their enterprise resource planning, which is not so common with mid-market firms,” he said.

“If they have a system that suits their needs it can be tough convincing them to change. You need to show return on investment and we are looking to put that into an OpEx rather than a CapEx argument.”