The move of the distributor’s facilities from Montreal to a facility of double the size in the Greater Toronto Area will enable more Canadian integration work, better SLAs for more customers, and improved co-ordination with the U.S. distribution facility in Indianapolis.
ShoreTel’s Canada country manager talks about the new offerings and what they will mean to partners and customers in the Canadian market.
Ottawa’s Combat Networks won the Networking Partner of the Year award from Avaya. The solution provider, which has a deep Avaya practice, also listened closely to the details about Avaya’s strategy and approach going forward.
Santiago Aguirre, who adds Canada to his Caribbean and Latin American responsibilities, says this will leverage regional strength to strengthen Avaya in Canada, and that he won’t be disrupting Auld’s work in Canada.
Westcon’s Comstor group teams with Polycom to offer cloud-based video-as-a-service that solution providers can offer under its GoldSeal services label.
Avaya recently introduced its new Avaya Midmarket Select Program. But the program itself is only part of the company’s strategy to significantly increase its presence in the mid-market space in Canada.
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 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.
The Logitech Collaboration program is aimed at improving integration and planning with vendor partners, but the collaboration also has direct impact on Logitech’s reseller channel.
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.
Digital disruption is intensifying IT democratization, and Dell is responding with a datacentre strategy which some competitors likely consider heresy, but which Dell believes is the wave of the future.
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.
ADTRAN has dumped product discount rules intended to ensure quality by limiting discounts to partners specializing in the area, while at the same time expanding training with free self-serve modules, and eliminating the deal registration revenue threshold.
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.
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.
Avaya sales boss Pierre-Paul Allard tells the company’s partners they have to ramp up their cloud game or they risk losing relevancy with their customers.
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.
