Avaya says SIP growth leads to new revenue strategy

Avaya last week reminded attendees at its U.S./Gov Sales Leadership and Partner Conference that it has rolled out 60 products in the past year and a half, more than it has seen in the past 10 years. And, it said, more products are on the way, including plans to take its Flare collaboration platform to Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Android mobile devices, and to make its Aura Conferencing product more feature-rich.

Avaya, which has been gaining share on Cisco in the telephony equipment segment, has been reminding partners, in strong terms, that it wants them to focus more on its broader technology portfolio and on collaboration and user experience.

It's a revenue growth plan that it has been pitching at all of its recent channel partner conferences.

Alan Baratz, Avaya's SVP and president of Global Communications Solutions, says the push is predicated upon the continued growth of SIP technologies.

"The important and compelling thing about SIP is that it's all about sessions: it can carry the IP, it can carry video, it can carry IM, maybe other new types of traffic," he said. "It means you can have a single control infrastructure supporting all of that communication. That enables a lot of really compelling capabilities for the end customer," including cheaper infrastructure, and a more unified experience for the end user.

"Up until now, for Avaya, it really has been all about voice," Baratz said. "But now, on the same platform, we can do video, we can do web collaboration, we can do IM, everything, so we need to start investing in those other modes of communication. Video codecs become more important to us. Screen sharing becomes more important to us. It's really about the different types of communication and the technologies required to support those modes.

For more:
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