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Avaya makes significant organizational changes in Canada

CANCUN, MEX. – The big news coming out of this year’s Avaya Executive Partner Conference from a Canadian perspective is that the Canadian subsidiary has a new channel chief in Myles Davis.

Avaya Canada president Ross Pellizzari told CDN that former channel chief Renzo DiPasquale has been promoted to vice president of enterprise sales for the subsidiary.

“We needed a strategic manager for all the large business accounts. That’s where Renzo comes from. That’s Renzo’s experience he is now responsible for the entire enterprise strategy for Canada” Pellizzari said.

The DiPasquale and Davis moves where just two among several organization changes Pellizzari made.

He said that these moves needed to be made to address the new segmentation model Avaya is taking on not just in Canada but globally.

“Since I started at Avaya Canada I wanted to adopt a segmentation model to get more granular. These moves are more of a tune-up in terms of our go-to-market with segmentation. I now have the cavalry in place and the general is a Canadian friend Pierre Paul Allard (the newly named Avaya senior vice president of worldwide sales and president of global field operations),” Pellizzari said.

The rest of Avaya Canada’s cavalry looks like this:

  • Rejean Bourgault is the new vice president of sales for the Federal Government along with Quebec and the Maritimes;
  • Rahim Jivraj is the new vice president of sales for Ontario along with the four Western provinces;
  • Greg Scholtzauer is the central commercial sales leader;
  • Dave Crook is responsible for national commercial strategy;
  • Ian Perdell-Lewis is the new services leader for Avaya Canada;
  • Paul Hutchinson remains customer advocacy leader; and
  • Petrina Wong is the small markets leader.

What solution providers should also know is that the service providers, namely Bell, Telus and Allstream which used to dictate terms and conditions of deals with Avaya has changed the way they do business with the networking and collaboration vendor. Pellizzari described the changes this way: “If a service provider does not want to use Avaya technology for let’s say a cloud solution then it’s opened up to the entire channel. If a telco does not want an Avaya solution for a particular segment of the market; the channel partners can go in a sell there too with the help of distribution.”

What’s important to know here is the if solution providers win these deals Avaya would qualify them as new customer wins and the solution provider would earn an extra 14 points.

Pellizzari said this type of arrangement can be incredible lucrative for partners especially those targeting the old Nortel installed because which is conservatively pegged at 100,000 systems.

It also lessons the complexity for channel partners. Pellizzari said he would have to deal with situations where a solution provider would partner with Bell and then the next minute be competing with Bell. It was the same with Telus. These scenarios made it difficult and challenging for Avaya Canada and its top partners to win large deals.

Pellizzari believes that with his new organization in place he can address 60 per cent of the market demand, which is up by 10 per cent from last year. He also plans on hiring up to three acquisition account executives to increase that rate.

He also admitted that he has had to play defence a bit lately. But that now with this new group in place he is going on the offensive. The key to these organizational changes is to make sure all the geographies of the Canadian market were covered. As for the Nortel installed base, Avaya Canada was not addressing that opportunity the way they wanted to. Now Pellizzari is confident they can win through the channel.

“I call this my divide and conquer strategy. We divide up the market and conquer each segment with partners who have a strong value proposition that is complimentary to Avaya,” he said.

CDN will have more from Avaya Canada’s new channel chief Myles Davis in the next issue of CDN Now newsletter.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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