Jangoo Dalal has recently joined business communications systems provider Avaya as its managing director for India. Having previously worked with Cisco and then with D-Link India as its managing director, Dalal is well equipped to take on the challenge of steering the company’s business strategy in the region. In an interview with tele.net, he discusses growth trends in the Indian enterprise industry and the way forward for Avaya India. Excerpts…
What are the key trends in the Indian enterprise segment? How do you expect the enterprise market in India to grow over the next few years?
First of all, it is a bit hazardous to club all business in India under one umbrella term, “enterprise segment”. Within the enterprise segment, there are different industry verticals and different segments of the market. Some enterprise segments just serve the domestic market while others serve the global market.Depending on which segment you are in, the trends are different.
Second, from a macro perspective, one can witness a lot of consolidation taking place in the enterprise segment. Enterprises are looking to consolidate their communications infrastructure.Moreover, enterprises have transformed from thinking of communications as something that is a part of a support system or support infrastructure for a lot of customers to viewing the investments they make on the same as a key part of the business itself.
Avaya, for example, focuses on two main technologies: unified communications and contact centres. For a lot of industries such as banking, finance, airlines and telecom players, contact centres are becoming critical. Contact centres are probably the only vehicle that allows them to get in touch with prospective as well as existing customers and it is also the only medium by which customers can reach the vendor. For example, when was the last time a person like you or me visited a bank branch? We do most of our stuff on the internet or through a call centre. The internet call centres are all getting integrated with contact centres.
It is a similar case with telecom service providers. India is adding over 10 million subscribers every month. Most of the telcos are adding anywhere from half a million to 1.5 million subscribers, depending upon the size of the service provider. This type of scale is impossible to achieve with the number of salespeople that have to service this customer base.So, it is coming back to the contact centre. For many large enterprises and specific industries, communications is becoming an integral part of the business rather than being just the support infrastructure. We saw a bit of a contraction in the past twothree quarters due to the global slowdown but since then, we are seeing signs of recovery. There are several segments that are growing robustly while others are picking up speed. So, in a year, year and a half, we should see robust growth in the enterprise segment, especially for certain lines of businesses like ours in communications. We are bullish on the growth prospects of both contact centres as well as unified communications.Different industries and different vertical segments use it differently but at the end of the day, communications is what every segment needs. Some are slow to perform while others perform a bit faster. But across sectors, we see robust growth ahead of us.
What are Avaya’s key offerings and major consumer segments? What are the segments that will do well in the coming years?
Our key offerings revolve around two main technologies: unified communications and contact centres. With respect to industry verticals, communications is something that every industry uses, so you have everything from basic telephony to internet to basic data connectivity.Unified communications is about converging data, voice, video, etc. into one piece and making it available anytime, on any device.
As mentioned earlier, these technologies cut across all segments. While some industries may be faster to adopt the same, others may be slower. However, at the end of the day, communications technologies cut across all segments. But specifically, service industries, such as airlines, IT, telecom and hospitality, are doing much better for us than some of the other, more traditional industries. Banking is also a key part of the services industry. We believe that all sectors of the industry will grow, but these will grow a bit faster.
Where does Avaya stand vis-a-vis its competitors in the market?
We are doing very well. According to Frost & Sullivan estimates, in calendar year 2008, Avaya was the number one player for both unified communications and contact centres in India, in terms of market share.
What are the company’s key thrust areas in the near future and the long run?
We are focused on unified communications and contact centres. But we also have an architecture road map, called Avaya Aura, which we defined a couple of months back.Over the next few years, everything that we do in both unified communications and contact centres will revolve around the Avaya Aura architecture.
Essentially what the Avaya Aura talks about (and we have started delivering on that) is an open standards-based architecture which allows customers to protect their existing investments in whatever communications technologies they have and move ahead into unified communications using the latest applications and services that unified communications offers.As you want to go for the new services and applications of unified communications and the productivity that comes along, Aura allows you to grow incrementally and protect your investments in whatever legacy systems you have.
In order to retain the investment and move forward in the world of unified communications, Avaya Aura allows you to tie together multiple heterogeneous environments. So, for example, if you are a global company, the Aura allows you to tie all your global infrastructure together and then offer common centralised services and applications, and provide a uniform look and feel to all users. Essentially most of our thrust and innovation will happen around the Aura architecture.
What are your plans for unified communications? What new features can be added now that 3G has been launched?
Most of our plans for unified communications will revolve around the Aura architecture. More specifically with 3G, if you look at unified communications, you can unify data, voice and video into one common communications infrastructure and reap the benefits of doing that, and then move across the three platforms.
The other use of unified communications is ubiquity. Ubiquity allows you to have it any time, any place, on any device of your choice. What this essentially means is that whether you are at home using a landline or in the office using a sophisticated PBX or on the road using a mobile phone or on the web on a social networking site like Facebook, or using a PDA ?? the system will know where you are, what presence you have and what end-point you are using, and then give you a seamless user experience on unified communications across all these devices anywhere, any time. I would say that 3G is but a sub-component and method of delivering unified communications to customers in the sense that 3G would allow data voice and video even on mobile handsets. Then you could use unified communications even on the mobile infrastructure.
What, according to you, are the key concerns that need to be tackled?
There are no real concerns as such. India has its own rhythm and pace. You have to observe the markets for a little while. You need to understand that the Indian market has huge opportunity but that opportunity is available for those who understand the market and do things that are local and relevant to the market. So, I think some amount of localisation and standardisation is necessary. I would say there are no major concerns, and that if you want to succeed, you need to have everything that is centred around India. All in all, things are coming together quite fast.
There is a large unfulfilled potential in India. This is also due to the low broadband penetration in the country. It is lower even compared to many other developing countries. The government is cognisant of this and many initiatives are being taken around this. But when Wi-Max etc. come into play, this will pick up steam.
How has the financial crisis impacted your business? What has been your strategy to withstand the same?
On a global basis, as the business slowed down in different parts of the world, our revenue also slowed down. However, what was also happening in this period was that our market share was robust and had improved. While the industry slowed down, our slowdown was, in the worst case, as slow as the industry or in some cases, we did better than the industry.Over the past two years, as part of our overall restructuring and redirecting of the company, we have taken a lot of initiatives and these have really begun to bear fruit.
In fact, we started our journey on restructuring and reinventing sometime around calendar year 2007. So, we were lucky and relatively geared up to take on the slowdown. While revenues slowed down, we did better than the industry in most parts of the world and in terms of cash flows and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), we actually did better than what we were doing in the past.
