This year Avaya decided to forgo their annual industry analyst meeting. Even had the economy not been an issue, it would have been a good call. Until the Nortel acquisition is finalized, and the company is ready and able to talk about the combined roadmap, a meeting in the traditional November timeframe would have been at best frustrating and at worst a waste of time.Unlike other companies who cancelled meetings, Avaya has followed through on a plan to have a regular analyst deep dive web conferences on a topic that might traditionally show up on an analyst meeting agenda. In September there was one on the latest release of IP Office; in October Steve Hardy discussed the virtualized Aura System Platform for the SMB market; and in November the topic was "Overview of Avaya Aura Application Sequencing."
There's nothing fancy about the logistics. Just an audio bridge and a PDF of the presentation available for download before the call. And that's fine with me. No virtual environment to wade through, only to find the presentations aren't available except via streaming. No web-based conferencing technology with a high propensity to drop a speaker or introduce noise. No ability to IM the presenter, organizer or other participants, but I find I don't use that when it is available, since I'm concerned my comments will be captured for posterity. There's always email, public IM or Twitter when I feel the need to communicate.
Logistics aside, the most recent topic was Avaya Professional Services. Greg Billings gave the talk; he's been a VP of Professional Services at Avaya since August 2008. Earlier in his career he spent eight years at Capgemini, one of the top IT services and consulting companies worldwide, and it shows. His approach to customer projects is not "how do we install this box in your environment?" but "how can we help deliver business results on time and on budget?"
To formalize this approach, Avaya has begun using a "Self-Funded Roadmap Methodology." The first step is to Gather data on the company's existing expenditures--not just the trunks and the equipment but the operational expense, like applications and people costs. The next step is called Scan, an analysis step used to scour the network and telecom data for trends, usage, redundancies, and unused resources as well as looking at the end-to-end processes for inbound and outbound communications, identifying manual steps and problematic KPIs. Prioritize and Design phases provide an architecture and plan for implementing the new solutions in a phased fashion.
The self-funding notion is appealing. An example might be the Phase I deployment of Call Back Assist to help with long queue times (callers are told they will be called back when their queue time is up, instead of having to wait on hold.) Some of the savings in FTEs derived from flattening call volume can be used to fund a Phase II installation of technology for Proactive Campaigns to increase revenue. Revenue earned here could help fund Phase III updating of Self Service Applications.
Often vendors promise ROI benefits--oh, like UC will save thousands of dollars per worker per year--but seldom put their own revenues on the line to support their claims. Billings explained that as customers are signing up for self-funded projects, "If we don't deliver, we are reducing or waiving the cost of the project." Impressive.
