Avaya's Global Alliance opens to regional VARs
Telephony vendor plans to make alliance programme available to regional players in 2008
Avaya will make its new Global AlliancePartner programme for systems integrators (SIs) and service providers (SPs) available to regional partners such as Dimension Data (Didata) from next year.
The telephony vendor rolled the new programme – which aims to formalise ties with large services partners – into EMEA in February, and last week held its first Global AlliancePartner programme council in the region.
Partners already enrolled in the scheme include BT, Orange Business Services, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Louise Bennett, EMEA programme manager, told CRN: “In EMEA we’ve always tried to fit SIs and SPs into our Business Partner programme. We now deal with them at a higher level and look at them as global partners.
“We’re planning to make the Alliance programme available to regional players such as Didata in 2008.”
Mike Bortnowski, director of Avaya’s Global Alliance programme, said the council had given partners a chance to voice what they liked and disliked about the new programme.
“Our area of focus will be to improve our ease of doing business with partners,” he said.
He added that the programme gave partners a consistent structure for pricing discounts and support models.
Martin Hill-Wilson, strategy director at Avaya Platinum partner DataPoint, said: “Avaya is migrating rapidly away from individual product sets to solutions. SIs’ business process knowledge will be increasingly important to it.”