What is your focus from the geography perspective?
We treat all geographies equally but yes we react to the trend of the geography. For example, India as a geo has vision and direction to growth. We cannot have different strategy but to go by the trend of the country. When you see that Africa is continuing to boom, we cannot ignore that. Similarly, when you see that Europe is trying to wake up from financial crisis you cannot actually ignore that.
One Chinese decided to implement a technology that they believe is right, we cannot ignore that. If we want to operate in China we have to comply with that. I focus on what the country requires from me and we are after revenue.
As Europe comes up, we will keep on focusing on Germany and UK and continue to invest and bring in new talents to these countries. We focus based on the technology. Cloud is maturing in Europe, Australia and Japan, and slowly coming to the rest of the world, so we are focusing on the technology not one place less than other.
Avaya is becoming a software company?
We are the software company for the real business communications. We have built software to support real-time business communication. It means anything to do with legacy telephony, call centre, contact centre, customer experience centre, application that is related to the communication in an enterprise; that we are moving to software. We used to depend so much on cards, gateway technologies on servers and make software to work with the servers but what we did now is that we moved all the software and operating system from the servers to a CD to offer the virtualized environment to the customers. It means we allowed the customers to buy our networking piece by putting our CD on the white level boxes to run the devices. And that is how we became a Software company. Would you see our logo on the phones and boxes, yes absolutely! But by April 2016, everything we manufacture will be available in software.
In the partner connect event, we selectively invited the decision makers of our partners so that they can hear the message and prepare themselves. Any programme is being launched are evolving from hardware to software to solutions to services. We want they should migrate with us to the new programmes. We are hiring talents to address this and we want them to do the same. We are not only changing the programme but also want to change the mind-set as well.
Our Aura 7 is already changed and available now with a controller because we want to implement it in right manner. The customers if want to buy in pure software format they can buy it. They need not to buy the gateway.
How are you viewing SDN build up?
Software Defined Networks or Software Defined Enterprise whatever people call it; the train has left the station. People cannot stop it.
We give the countries the faster access and ability to take quick decision to undertake any initiative to align with the development of the country. We do not need much preparation for that because we are quite agile for that. We have got more than 2000 people doing R&D for us in SDN, networking and voice space. If we want to go for any activity around IoT or smart government or digitization things, we do not have any challenge because we have got resources on the ground, in addition to the resources of the ecosystem. Most of our R&D is sitting in this geography – Israel, Italy, Russia, China and India.
We have also debated for a long time whether PC will remain or Mobile device will remain or both the things will remain. Avaya as a company will offer support to both the forms of devices and will bring out a device which will give people option.
Key Takeaways
We are reinforcing the message with the partners that customer is the key. We are upgrading the young talent to support us in our mission. We encourage high rank diversity. Half of our management team are female. Avaya is also relaunching its sales motion for the customers. The Avaya way is customer first. So internally we are allowing people to undergo rigid training. I am also one of the trainers.
I am hopeful of double digit growth which is of course in paper but depending on the market condition it will be defined.
