Thursday, May 29, 2008 IT company develops products for small, medium enterprises
A TELECOMMUNICATION solutions company has introduced a new product line that will cater to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Edgardo Doctolero, country president for Avaya Philippines Inc. (Avaya), said that with the introduction of its “specially marked-down bundles,” the company is also sending a message to the industry that it is “playing” in the SME market.
The group handling the Avaya Small and Medium Business Solutions (SMBS) will focus exclusively on SMEs, like law offices, schools and medical clinics.
The SMBS will be available also to start-up contact centers that employ less than 100 call agents, said Doctolero.
“SMEs are those (firms) with employees from 10 to 100,” Doctolero explained when asked how the company profiles the SMEs.
The SMBS packages will make use of Avaya’s S8300 servers. There are four bundles to choose from which ranges from 50
user licenses to 100.
These packages will also offer flexibility to the companies since the solution is already “hybrid,” which means that there will be no need for the company to rebuild the structure should it decide to upgrade its system.
Doctolero also said that through its partners and re-sellers, Avaya can provide after sales support by deploying engineers to assist the SME customers, especially when SME companies may not be able to afford to hire its own engineer.
In the country, Avaya is exclusively distributed by Lamco International.
The company also caters to large corporations in the country, covering 63 percent of the market from various industries that
go for Internet protocol (IP) telephony to improve its existing private branch exchange systems (PBX).
Thirty-three percent of Avaya’s market share is comprised of contact centers. With this, the company is also looking at Cebu as an important area since most call centers in Manila have chosen the province as its second site.
“We’d like to grow the Avaya market here,” said Doctolero.
But the company’s key (growth driver) is the banking industry since banks are the early adopters of technology,” Doctolero said.
Although the company has done well in the industry, Doctolero said it wants to improve its leadership by offering value-added services to its customers. “There should be value in the applications since everybody can make IP telephony,” he said.
One of its programs, called Dev Connect, allows Avaya end-users or independent software developers to come up with new applications that can function around the Avaya solution.
“The patent of the program will be owned by the developer, but Avaya will also certify it,” Doctolero said.
Together with the launch of the SMBS, Avaya also held a seminar on IP Telephony solution for SMEs at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino last Wednesday. The seminar was participated in by over 100 telecommunications engineers, information technology managers from various industries in Cebu.
Avaya already has over 100 years of experience in the telecommunication solutions industry, including the period it merged with Lucent Technologies Inc. (DME)
