Avaya gets aggressive with rivals

Vendor uses partner summit to bare its competitive teeth

Avaya is unabashedly going all guns blazing for its biggest competitors in 2012 as it attempts to smash Genesys, Cisco, ShoreTel and Microsoft.

Speaking at the vendor's EMEA partner conference in Berlin this week, Alan Baratz, Avaya's president of global communications solutions, revealed a three-point plan for "stopping Microsoft and Cisco's enterprise growth".

First up is convincing customers to deploy Avaya for network simplification, followed by ensuring that Avaya integrates with customers' existing investments in infrastructure. Finally Baratz told partners they should look to provide differentiation through technologies like video, mobile and collaboration.

"We have the ability to go into a Cisco or Microsoft environment without [the customer] having to rip and replace," he added.

In the SMB space, Baratz outlined his intentions to get the better of ShoreTel and Cisco. He claimed that Avaya's IP Office architecture can scale up for 1,000 users on a single box, compared with four boxes for Cisco and eight for ShoreTel.

"All the work we have done has brought us pretty much to parity with ShoreTel," added Baratz.

Across the contact centre market, Avaya is looking to topple long-time partner Genesys.

"Up until now Avaya has been the provider with the largest market share in the contact centre space. But when it came to the higher levels, we relied on partners," explained Baratz.

"One of the biggest is Genesys. "But we have evolved to the point where many of our large contact centre deployments are a mix of Avaya and Genesys. We have now built up the stack and can compete very effectively against Genesys.

"Now is the time to displace Genesys. We have won competitive bids in greenfield [accounts], we have displaced Genesys in a couple of customer accounts."