The mid-market is the key area of focus for Avaya Canada’s channel this year, but networking, cloud and video are also on the priority list.
The Avaya Midmarket Select Program is focused on a select number of partners, and lets them allow rock bottom pricing in packages designed to facilitate solution sales. Avaya Canada’s key role in the program’s development has resulted in six of the 40 partners in the global program being Canadian.
The new program is also much simpler than the old, with the number of tiers cut by almost two thirds. The cloud changes won’t impact Canada though – the cloud product still isn’t available here. Canadian partners will find opportunity registration and training changes interesting however.
Sennheiser, best known for its premium consumer products, already has a strong distribution network in Canada, but adds two more distributors to generate more opportunities and stimulate even greater awareness of its presence in the commercial space.
The Voyager Focus UC becomes the top of the line model in Plantronics’ noise cancelling office products line. It also features Dynamic Mute Alert feature, which senses and alerts users when they are trying to talk when muted.
Esna will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Avaya, with Avaya ‘planning to adopt’ Esna’s over 200 active channel partners. Avaya also said the deal will provide existing Avaya partners with significant new opportunities.
The new cloud offering comes from a Canadian-based datacentre, and is designed to appeal to SMBs as well as midmarket customers considering cloud.
Polycom introduces new and more flexible criteria to reach higher partner levels, while at the same time requiring minimum sales thresholds at all levels and getting more rigorous about joint business plans for upper tier partners.
In the U.S., ScanSource will carry Mitel’s entire product line, but in Canada, where the core Mitel products do not go through distribution at all, ScanSource will be limited to the Aastra product line.
The mid-sized XT4300 room system will be a stronger channel play than most of the Scopia lineup.
The German IP phone maker enlists its long-time U.S., distribution partner, which also has a strong presence in western Canada, to expand their presence there.
The new version of Mitel’s cloud communication enhances partner capabilities to offer customers new functionality, while helping the partners deploy and provision their resources more effectively.
SMART kapp is a unique electronic replacement for dry erase boards and flipcharts which will appeal to A/V resellers, but could be sold by anyone who sells into an office environment.
A key theme with these releases is the adapation of superior noise cancelling technology, which was originally deployed in the consumer space, for enterprise products.
Business analytics joins unified communications, collaboration, and file-sharing among PanTerra’s service offerings.
Avaya rebrands and reorganizes its collaboration solutions to focus on engagement, and announces some significant new and enhanced solutions, including a beefed-up version of IP Office.
Circuit brings together voice, video, screen sharing, messaging, and file sharing within a single interface, with extreme simplicity of use.
Plantronics says their new family of lightweight headsets with noise cancelling technology are designed to change what headsets provide to an organization.
The big gain for Avaya is that HP ES will greatly amplify the reach of Avaya Private Cloud Services, and they say the channel will have a significant role to play.
ShoreTel says the new virtualized router will let their VARs be more aggressive in small 5-15 unit mobile deployments, because eliminating the router cost for a 10 unit deployment cuts the initial investment in getting 10 users live by two thirds.
