Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services, hosted its annual PartnerConnect Conference on 23 January in Johannesburg. The conference focused on helping partners throughout the African continent grow their regional adoption of the company’s innovative video, collaboration and customer care solutions.
To better understand the use of various forms of communication technologies and issues organisations are facing in South Africa, Avaya conducted a survey. The research found that 62% of the respondents are using video conferencing as a way to conduct meetings. They also found that 40% of them have close to half of their workforce operating in a mobile environment.
Factors like these are the reason that in 2012 Avaya made a number of strategic acquisitions, grew its midmarket solutions to address South Africa’s burgeoning small- and medium-sized business sector, and advanced its applications to address the communications challenges facing the region’s private and government sectors.
“The Time is Now” is Avaya’s theme at this year’s conference, highlighting the need for businesses to integrate video, voice and data communications into their customer interactions for increased efficiency and competitive advantage.
“For over a decade Avaya has been empowering their South African channel and customers to address specific, timely business opportunities in the region as companies look for better customer care solutions, move toward cloud adoption, and increase collaboration across regional and international offices – all of these initiatives create significant growth platforms for Avaya’s partners in the region,” comments Selvin Kristnen, MD South Africa, AVAYA.
“Whether in developing expertise for specific industries or implementing new solutions such as video collaboration and social media integration, Avaya is ensuring that our partners have the training, skills, and tools needed to address these opportunities.”
Avaya is recognised by leading industry analysts like Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, and T3i Group as the global market share leader in several industry categories, like unified communications (UC), unified messaging, contact centres and SME telephony systems.
Avaya continuously invests in resources within South Africa by growing their staff, enabling their partner base and expanding their operations through their training centre, which is situated in Bryanston, assuring customer and partner success.
With Avaya’s recent acquisitions of Radvision, a leading provider of video conferencing technologies over IP and wireless networks, and Aurix, a speech analytics and audio data mining technology specialist, partners can now offer a full portfolio of communications solutions to the region’s hotels, banks, universities, telecoms operators, and government entities as well as other key industries.
