Avaya saddles up partners for midmarket assault

iConnect scheme designed to speed time to market for resellers targeting midmarket success

Avaya is making a £3m investment to help its UK partners crack the midmarket.

The comms vendor has unveiled iConnect, a programme designed to lower resellers' cost of entry into a part of the market it claims is defying the downturn.

Costing partners $10,000 to join, iConnect enables partners to complete 16 Avaya certifications within a week using Avaya demo kit from their own premises. They will then net extra cash for punting IP Office and Avaya's other midmarket wares and dedicated marketing support, as well as enjoying support from Avaya's new team of territory account managers (TAMs).

Overall, the investment from Avaya represents £3m in the UK, estimated Michelle Jones, EMEA channel development and marketing director at Avaya.

The training alone would cost resellers about 15 per cent more if they were to do it on an a la carte basis, she pointed out. "While markets have been flattening more generally, the midmarket continues to defy the downturn," Jones said.

"We've created Avaya iConnect to give partners quick and easy access to all the training they need in one place so that they can really take advantage of this lucrative market opportunity."

Aurora Networks, Capstone, G3, iQual and Pennine Telecom are among the existing partners to have signed up to the programme. At least 50 UK partners will have signed up by Christmas, she predicted.

Avaya has enlisted the help of an external marketing agency to drum up midmarket leads.

Jones said iConnect is aimed at three profiles of resellers: existing enterprise-focused partners hunting for an alternative to Aura to increase their market coverage; existing partners that have traditionally sold IP Office to SMEs that are looking to scale up; and net new partners.

"There is definitely white space out there and, working with distribution, with iConnect we now have a compelling programme to bring them in," said Jones.