Global Connect touts unified communications

Although GlobalConnect isn’t Avaya’s largest partner, it is one of the most interesting. The vendor owns 59 percent of the company, and is a subsidiary of Avaya Global Connect.

Avaya GlobalConnect is an enterprise converged communication solutions provider in India. The company offers a comprehensive suite of Solutions for Contact centre, Business Process Outsourcing and end-to-end Converged communications.

Headquartered at Gurgaon, India the company has a supply centre at Gandhinagar with a network of six regional offices, 11 branches and smaller service centers across the continent.

Avaya GlobalConnect also has a lab in Gurgaon, deploying complete products and solutions. The latest products and solutions are demonstrated and showcased to customers at this Lab, which is also used to train internal associates, business partners and customers.

Pushkar Taneja managing director at GlobalConnect Australia said the local branch runs as an independent company and in no way relies on the vendor for preferential treatment.

“GlobalConnect provides IP converged solutions for contact centres as well as applications and we provide end-to-end solutions. These products are primarily Avaya products, we also have products from Witness and Nice in our portfolio,” he said.

According to Taneja GlobalConnect operates more like a channel partner and it works as hard, “if not harder” to prove it's independent from the vendor.

“Our business is visible to the public because of our linkage with Avaya. We have to comply with international business laws like Sarbanes Oxley. All of our transactions are clean and our financial records are on display for scrutiny,” said Taneja.

No other business partner, especially a privately-owned reseller, has to comply with such stringent rules and regulations. Being a gold partner has meant GlobalConnect has had to adhere to certain criteria when it comes to sales.

The reseller’s headquarters are located in Sydney, Melbourne and it has recently opened a South Australian office in October 2006. It has customers throughout the country including Western Australia, Tasmania Queensland.

“We have just over 50 staff throughout Australia and we are looking to expand and increase the business. I am quite confident we can double the market, previously we were at 33 people towards September last year, and we have built that up to 50. So it’s been a constant growth for us,” said Taneja.

He believes the telephony market has changed and what people are seeing is a lot of focus on updating of old TDM phone systems to IP based products. According to Pushkar there are also customers in greenfield environments - due to expansion or starting up in a new country – that wants to go directly to an IP solution based telephony system.

The desktop is also being used to help make phone calls simpler through Unified Communications (UC), said Taneja.

UC is the convergence of real-time and non-real-time business communication applications and these applications include telephony, conferencing, email, voice mail, instant messaging, video, and collaboration across a variety of interfaces be it PC or web-based clients, telephones and mobile devices, or speech.

A recent IDC APAC survey - titled “Integrating Mobility with Unified Communications: Business Communication Sheds Complexities”, identified that more and more businesses recognise that the absence of an effective, Unified Communications system is detrimental to business performance.

Organisations are constantly in search of new ways to transform their businesses, streamline processes in order to achieve greater productivity and communicate more efficiently with customers, suppliers and employees. For these companies, UC provides a distinct competitive advantage.

The strength of UC lies in its ability to integrate individual communication tools in order to deliver greater accuracy in person-to-person communications and significant improvements in business processes and productivity.

“A number of our large customers in industries like banking, mining telemarketing, are some of the more active verticals where UC is looked upon as just not a simple matter of plug and play set of products,” he said.

Taneja said a lot of checks are involved in ensuring that the technologies are compatible and if the products aren’t then it has to go through a process of customisation.

With a little over in various verticals mining and banking, telemarketing, health services insurance and other utilities, Taneja said the reseller is determined to win its projects based on merits and not ride the coattails of the Avaya name.

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