Avaya’s One Source Aids UC Quoting and Ordering Process
Avaya’s One Source Aids UC Quoting and Ordering Process by UCStrategies Staff
It is expected that Santa Clara, California-based Avaya’s partners will receive a more streamlined quoting and ordering process later in the year; this will be made available through the company’s One Source platform which is a Web-based portal that can consolidate quoting and pricing details for Avaya’s unified communications (UC), contact center (CC), networking and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) solutions into a single view for partners.
The senior vice president of global sales at Avaya, Tom Mitchell, has stated that One Source was created in order to meet the demands of partners that wanted an easier way to do business with the company. He said: “The partners certainly expressed the concern, and we listened. Make no mistake about that. But we also knew we were on an unsustainable platform, too.”
The One Source platform will be available in the North American channel in Q4 this year, and will be released in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific in a couple of months.
One Source will bring millions of dollars and years of development, and this initiative has been enabled by the acquisition of Nortel in 2009 and the purchase of Radvision in 2012. Formerly, Avaya had separate pricing and quoting processes for legacy Avaya, Nortel and Radvision products, which was a comprehensive and time-consuming process. According to Mitchell, “There were multiple tools to do a single configuration on an order when you ran across Nortel, Avaya ... and Radvision [products].”
By merging the quoting and ordering system, One Source has eradicated the previous problems for the whole Avaya portfolio, and partners can now access this from a single Web-based location.
Furthermore, One Source lowers the number of material price groups and SKUs Avaya partners have to navigate. In the past, the company had thousands of SKUs bunched into over 1,400 material price groups in order to offer partner discounts. Avaya distributors and partners, therefore, spent a long time going through over 1,400 discounts in order to find the appropriate buying price for Avaya products.
The 1,400 material price groups have been decreased to a more manageable 13, and the 200 pricing catalogs at the company have also been grouped into one. Avaya also offers standardized pricing globally, which means that price points remain consistent, regardless of region. It has also become apparent that One Souce can lower, from 50 percent to 87 percent, the time it takes for partners to get quotes.
The director of marketing at Lexington, Massachusetts-based Integration Partners (a solution provider), Bill Xydia, said that One Source will be faster and more efficient in working out costs of customer quotes. He said: “Avaya working with its channel partner community and simplifying things and making it easier to do business with them – that’s what it's all about. It's about the customer experience, and if I can get a quote to them within hours, we all look good.”
Collaborations with Integration Partners and the Avaya team have been underway for some time, and the work continues to improve One Source. Xydias said: “Everyone from senior management down to local support, the Avaya team has been pretty involved. They're engaged, they support us and it's open communication.” (CY) Link