Avaya Canada has announced enhancements and price reductions of more than 30 per cent to its MultiVantage Express 2.0 mid-size solution. These announcements, an Avaya Canada spokesperson says, are a way in which the company and its partners can remain more competitive.
The MultiVantage Express 2.0 communications solution is a combination of messaging, mobility, unified communications and customer contact applications that are all integrated onto one server. Tracy Fleming, national IP telephony practice leader at Avaya Canada, said what makes this solution ideal for mid-sized businesses is that it has the ability to scale from 100 to 500 users at up to 10 locations and 240 trunks. Fleming said Avaya saw a need in the mid-market space for a solution that would provide smaller and mid-sized businesses with the same benefits and features of what larger organizations enjoy with their communications solutions.
“MultiVantage Express is based on Avaya Communications Manager software,” Fleming said. “Partners can now offer the same feature-rich applications that larger corporations have, all while only using one server.”
Fleming continued that since MultiVantage Express was first released, there has been a great deal of interest and demand from customers. Therefore, when MultiVantage Express 2.0 was released for mid-market use last month, Fleming said it only made sense for Avaya to introduce it as a low-price solution.
Jayanth Angl, a research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, said the recent price reductions are a testament to the fact that there’s so much stiff competition out there in this space already.
“This (price reductions) makes MultiVantage Express 2.0 more competitive because it also provides partners with a more competitive portfolio to present to their existing customers and to the potential ones who may also be looking at Cisco or Nortel,” Angl said.
To help make it easier for partners, Fleming said MultiVantage Express 2.0 has been designed so it’s easier for partners to install in just a few hours since all of the applications are consolidated onto a single server.
“Partners can benefit from high margins because there’s less resources involved on their parts,” Fleming said. “And because we’re talking about an installation in just a few hours, this translates into margins for them.”
Angl on the other hand, thinks that due to the level of competition in this space, margins may not be as ideal as partners would like them to be.
“Due to the length of where some vendors are going to get market share, I think margins will be slimmer because it’s all a case of competition,” he said.
Some new enhancements made to MultiVantage Express 2.0 include a single number reachability feature, where incoming calls can be directed, forwarded or sent as a conference call to a cellular phone or notebook, as well as a new user-friendly graphic user interface, which makes it even easier to use.
“This solution makes small to medium sized organizations look like huge organizations because they have the same features and logic being used in say a 5,000 seat call centre,” Fleming said.
The mid-market space, Fleming adds, is one where Avaya still sees plenty of room for growth opportunities. Last year alone, Fleming said Avaya Canada acquired 153 new customers and a large number of them were in the mid-market field.
“This year is an exciting year for us because IP telephony is where we are today. It’s no longer a discussion about how to get this capability, but it’s more a matter of okay, I have this now, so what does this mean for my business? These solutions now change the way businesses operate.”
