Avaya VARs told to go after mid-market to beat margin crunch

EMEA channel boss wants resellers selling across the vendor's portfolio as comms and networking space comes under price pressure

Avaya's EMEA channel chief wants to tool up partners to go after business in a mid-market space still offering lucrative opportunities as the comms and network market faces a margin crunch.

Claire Macland was appointed as the vendor's EMEA channel vice president about a year ago. She told CRN that her priority for the coming months is to ensure more partners sell technologies across the breadth of the vendor's comms and networking portfolio.

"A lot of partners may already work with other video vendors [for example], but what they are looking for is to consolidate their vendor [portfolio] and go to market with a complete story," she added.

In the second half of last year Avaya's roster of 800 UK partners was cut in half as 400 resellers doing minimal amounts of business were excised. But in late 2012 UK country head Simon Culmer outlined that he was looking to add almost 100 new partners, predominantly in the SMB arena.

"What we are now working to do is to make sure we have the best alignment of partners so that there is enough business to go after without having people going after the same deals," added Macland. "There are other vendors who play in the same space as us that are known for having lots of partners going after the same deals and we do not want to do that.

"We are trying to increase the role that distribution plays for us. We are very actively driving our distributors in areas like new partner on-boarding and partner recruitment and development activities."

In recent weeks market watchers have reported that margins in the telephony and networking markets have come under heavy strain as manufacturers fight to maintain share as revenue goes south. Macland (pictured) conceded that the market is a tough one in which to operate at the moment, but outlined that Avaya sees a comparatively buoyant mid-market as a key battleground for the channel this year.

"If you look at the numbers that all the vendors are delivering in their financials, there is a lot of pressure [on the market]," she said. "But where we see a lot of market movement is in the mid-market space, between 200 and 1,000 users. These are still quite large organisations, but sales cycles seem to move faster. We have a lot of interesting conversations with partners around how well they are set up to be able to sell into the mid-market space."