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Wakim[1].Thmb.jpg SMEs must take advantage of Unified Communications: Roy Wakim

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Saurabh Gupta | 04 Apr, 2011
Unified Communications (UC) is a technology that can help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in a way to reduce expenses and improve productivity, says Roy Wakim, Director, SME Communications, Avaya APAC in an exclusive interview to SME Times.
Excerpts of the interview...

Please tell our readers more about Avaya Inc?
Roy Wakim: Avaya provides unified communications, contact centers, data solutions, and related services. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. We offer our entire range of solutions in India. For SMEs, our IP Office portfolio offers small businesses a scalable, state-of-the-art solution for telephony, messaging, networking, conferencing, customer management, and unified communications.

Avaya IP Office is a highly modular IP telephone system designed to meet the needs of home offices, standalone businesses, and networked branch and head offices for small and medium businesses. IP Office gives growing companies a complete solution for telephony, messaging, networking, conferencing, customer management, and unified communications.

IP Office is a versatile communications solution that combines the reliability and ease of a traditional telephony system with the applications and advantages of an IP telephony solution. This converged communications solution can help businesses reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve customer service.

At Avaya, our guiding principle is that customers should be supported in migrating to IP telephony at their own pace, following their own path. Our clients can use a mix of digital, analog, and IP technology and still take advantage of all the applications that convergence provides.

IP Office addresses basic telephony needs, leverages built-in convergence capabilities, and capitalizes on robust unified applications to deliver intelligent communications to your users and customers. This small office IP phone system simplifies processes, and streamlines the information exchange within systems to create simple and effective communication experiences.

- Investment protection: The IP Office solution offers scalability to meet almost every future need of the business

For large enterprises our unified communications solutions is Avaya Aura™ platform, which easily integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-modal and multi-location businesses. In the contact center space, our Communication Manager portfolio has helped us to a market leading position, and there is exciting innovation in the contact center arena as the next generation of context-based interactions will enhance customer service levels still further. We have a strong data portfolio, with recently announced innovation in WLAN, Ethernet routing switches and advanced gateways helping reinforce our credentials for providing efficient, resilient, high-performance networks.

In what ways can your system help Small and Medium Business (SMBs)?

Roy Wakim: Avaya IP Office offers small businesses a scalable, state-of-the-art solution for telephony, messaging, networking, conferencing, customer management, and unified communications. Avaya’s IP Office helps deliver the following results:

- Connectivity and reliability: With personal extensions, transfer capability, paging, and auto attendant for after-hours, employees can receive calls more quickly and efficiently. They can access messages either by phone or by computer. The system has proven to be highly reliable, with virtually no outages or downtime

- Enhanced user satisfaction and productivity: Employees experience greater productivity with more efficient tools for serving their customers. They are no longer frustrated by lost or garbled messages retrieved from the answering machine, and they appreciate being able to prioritize calls on their PCs. The off-hours duty person can screen calls

- Outstanding customer service: Customers reach company personnel quickly and receive answers to their inquiries in expedited fashion. All calls are answered in person during business hours. During after-hours, routine messages are recorded in individual voicemail boxes, rather than on a message machine that serves the whole company; emergency calls are routed directly to the on-call person. These enhancements help the company to deliver on their promise of superior customer service 24/7, which is essential for gaining new business and retaining customers

What is Unified communications? How can this technology help SMBs?
Roy Wakim: Avaya defines Unified Communications as orchestrated communication and collaboration across locations, time, and medium to accelerate business results. Global economic slowdown has changed the face of how organisations are communicating now. CIOs have started following one golden rule: “Do more with less.” With its ability to reduce expenses and simultaneously improve productivity, Unified Communications tools became the obvious option. Today, even as the economy is gradually bouncing back to normalcy, Indian enterprises are now moving beyond basic communications and have made UC an integral part of their communication processes. These communications services are increasingly designed to be embedded into structured and unstructured business processes.

UC can benefit almost any enterprise, regardless of size. But because SMEs have less wiggle room to squander resources compared to larger companies, the technology can make a lot of sense for smaller enterprises. In the name of “productivity,” for example, many SME employees often have several different roles and less support compared to employees at larger companies who might have more narrowly defined job descriptions SMEs. In the SME businesses, people tend to wear many ‘hats’. Also, given the fact, penetration of IT is very low, which gives a huge opportunity to enterprise communications systems provider like Avaya to reach out to the SMEs and provide right solutions and ensure better ROIs for them.

From your market research, how do you see the SMB market in India?
Roy Wakim: According to a recent survey, the number of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India currently stands at 26 million. SMEs in India provide employment to 75% of the country’s workforce and contribute to more than 40% of the total Industrial output, 35% of which is exported. India has the second largest population of small and medium businesses (SMBs) among BRIC countries and the US.

Looking at the current trends, IP based systems like SIP, IP PBX and telephony systems are gaining ground. Vendors are putting in a lot of research and development into this area and aggressively launching various products to suit market needs. Different vendors adopt different approaches. Some utilize certain software that enables employees to remain connected and share information with peers using e-mail, instant message and video conferencing in an easier and cost effective manner. Others offer IP-based features including IP telephony on a local wireless network, PC-based attendant console, IP network interface, and screen-based operator. Avaya offers a range of products, some of which are specifically tailored to SME needs, such as Avaya IP Office, which is explained ahead.

What kind of challenges SMBs usually face in IT and ITeS integration in India?
Roy Wakim: SMEs face several challenges from capital to markets to people, from selection of appropriate technology for business to knowledge and access to new technology with adequate financial aid and stay in sync with the changing trends.

SMEs are an important market for Avaya and our solutions are well suited to address the issues faced by this segment. The biggest challenge that SMEs face is of lack of finance, difficulty in attracting the right talent and the inability to differentiate between investment and an expense when it comes to technology adoption.

Liquidity is a major challenge for SMBs. How cost-efficient are your products?

Roy Wakim: IP Office opens the door to a wide range of options for better managing your company’s mobile phone and long-distance charges by routing calls through the system and over broadband links. Save on calling costs when traveling – with just your laptop, headset and Internet connection, Power Users have everything they need to make and receive calls and reduce or eliminate calling costs when traveling.

Handle more calls with fewer people: Instead of using staff time to answer incoming calls, rely on the built-in intelligence in IP Office to route calls quickly and accurately.

Expand your talent pool without increasing real estate: Is your business growing, but you don’t want to add full-time staff? With IP Office you have the flexibility to have extra staff working from home—wherever that may be. Each would have access to all the communications and call handling capabilities your other employees have at the main office.

Eliminate conference calling fees: IP Office makes every day conferencing affordable and practical by providing your business with 128 party conference capacity; up to 64 parties on a single call.

Centralize administration: For businesses with more than one location, IP Office enables remote management and administration from a central location. No need to have an administrator at every site.

What does the government need to do to make SMBs more IT efficient? Your comments on this.
Roy Wakim: The government needs to look at programs that allow SME to invest in technology. By providing Technology refresh loans and/or tax breaks it will allow SME to reinvest in their business to become more efficient. Technology allows SME to become efficient.

Last but not least, your message to SMBs?

Roy Wakim: Avaya Small and Medium Enterprise Communications business unit is focused on designing, building and marketing complete communications systems for organizations with up to 250 employees.

From easy-to-use stand-alone systems to sophisticated and integrated multi-site solutions, Avaya helps SMEs increase the productivity of their employees, deliver superior customer service, and reduce costs. Together with thousands of certified partners in virtually every part of the world, Avaya delivers the full breadth of solutions and services that today’s SMEs require.
 
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SME focused ICT Channel Partner in India
Saleem Azad | Fri Nov 25 06:20:08 2011
Dear Mr. Wakim, CyberMedia Research(CMR)(www.cmrindia.com) has a SME focused ICT Channel Partner study across 40 Indian cities. This study provides a thorough insights on the variegated channel partner ecosystem covering more than 40 Indian cities. I think Avaya must take advantage of our channel partner study...This will certainly help to capture the 6th largest economy, India with a US$100 million SME market potential. Saleem Azad Assistant Manager - Sales & Marketing - South India CMR Ltd sazad@cmrindia.com


 
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