Avaya Details Rollout Plans For One Source Partner Portal

Avaya Monday announced launch details for its long-awaited One Source platform, a Web-based portal that will consolidate quoting and pricing details for Avaya's unified communications (UC), contact center (CC), networking and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) solutions into a single view for partners. According to Tom Mitchell, senior vice president of global sales at Avaya, One Source was developed in response to partners' requesting a simpler way to do business with Avaya.

"The partners certainly expressed the concern, and we listened. Make no mistake about that," Mitchell told CRN. "But we also knew we were on an unsustainable platform, too."

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Avaya said the One Source platform will be available to its North American channel partners in the fourth quarter of this year. The platform will also be rolled out in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific by July.

The need for One Source -- which Mitchell said is the result of millions of dollars and years of development -- was driven especially by Avaya's 2009 acquisition of Nortel and 2012 acquisition of Radvision. Prior to One Source, Avaya partners had to navigate separate pricing and quoting processes for legacy Avaya, Nortel and Radvision products, an undertaking that could sometimes be cumbersome and time-consuming.

"There were multiple tools to do a single configuration on an order when you ran across Nortel, Avaya ... and Radvision [products]," Mitchell said.

One Source eliminates this complexity by providing an integrated quoting and ordering system for the entire Avaya portfolio that partners can access within a single Web-based location.

Another benefit of One Source, Mitchell said, is that it reduces the number of material price groups and SKUs Avaya partners have to navigate. Historically, he said, Avaya had thousands of SKUs bucketed into more than 1,400 material price groups for partner discounting purposes. As a result, Avaya distributors and partners had to sift through more than 1,400 discounts to identify their true buying price for Avaya products.

With the launch of One Source, however, those 1,400 material price groups are being collapsed into a much more manageable 13. Meanwhile, Avaya's 200 pricing catalogs are also being bundled into one, and all product pricing is being standardized globally to ensure the consistency of price points across different geographical regions.

Mitchell said Avaya research found that One Source, overall, can reduce the time it takes for partners to get quotes by 50 to 87 percent.

Bill Xydias, director of marketing at Integration Partners, a Lexington, Mass.-based solution provider, said he looks forward to using One Source as a faster, more efficient way to calculate customer quotes.

"Avaya working with its channel partner community and simplifying things and making it easier to do business with them -- that's what it's all about," Xydias told CRN. "It's about the customer experience, and if I can get a quote to them within hours, we all look good."

Xydias said there had been on-going collaboration between Integration Partners and the Avaya team during One Source development, and that he looks forward to keeping the conversation going and constantly improving One Source, after the platform goes live later this year.

"Everyone from senior management down to local support, the Avaya team has been pretty involved," Xydias said. "They're engaged, they support us and it's open communication."

PUBLISHED MAY 6, 2013