Avaya Canada to make a huge channel recruitment push

CANCUN, MEX. – Miles Davis, the newly appointed channel chief of Avaya Canada, will be taking solution providers on a ROADS trip.

ROADS stands for Recruit Onboard Accreditation Develop Sustain and its Avaya latest program for building its channel network. Davis said that ROADS was established in the U.S. operation and has been brought to Canada.

His plan is to use the ROADS method to increase Avaya’s channel partner base. In the past, Avaya Canada would onboard about 120 new solution provider partners only to lose more than 100 at the end of the year.

“I am implementing this for Canada and we now have a metric to measure the progress. When we used to onboard 120 partners we would never speak to them. ROADS gives us a rigorous methodology and reach out to them to make sure they are successful as well as ramp them up with the new solutions we have,” Davis said.

An earlier test of the ROADS system enabled Avaya to onboard 60 new channel partners and only lost between five and 10 after a year, Davis added.

Currently Avaya Canada has roughly 260 channel partners and the goal for Davis is to increase that to 350 in 2014.  “I believe that target is reasonable and we are choosing a number that we can have impact with as opposed with a more is better approach,” Davis said.

Canada’s indirect business is actually better that Avaya overall. Avaya has 79 per cent of its business going through partners. Avaya Canada has 88 per cent of its business going through the channel and Davis told CDN that he wants to push that past 90 per cent.

Radvision and the new IP Office has been getting a lot of traction from channel partners, according to Davis. “These new solutions is opening up conversations for us that we did not have before. They are looking to us to help them punch through the data closet. This will also increase their own value in the marketplace and would also open them up to sell UC (unified communications) solutions.”

Also the new segmentation strategy will help in recruitment for Avaya Canada. Davis said that the Canadian operation now has the coverage in metro areas for IP Office and he is working on matching up partners to each segmentation area.

“We are starting to see partners looking to Avaya as an alternative in 2013. This was a breakthrough and are top Avaya partners are no longer looked upon as small or too risk as a an alternative to the bigger service providers,” Davis added.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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