Channel chat: Jennie Greene

Longform

“The enterprise area is getting smaller and the mid-market is growing” - Jennie Greene, Westcon

Four years ago, Jennie Greene left her job as Avaya channel development manager for Ireland at Nimans and went to work for Westcon in Ireland, Avaya’s biggest global distributor.

Greene says the mid-market will be a big area of focus in 2014 because that is where the growth has come from over the past two years. Avaya has expanded its IP Office product to take it beyond the SME space and into the mid-market, increasing its reach to cover as many as 2,000 users (although it can start at as low as five users).

“It scales right across the board,” Greene says. There are a number of partners that have been selling the product for many years but with the changing market, the latest release provides partners with new business opportunities in delivering enterprise-type technology on a smaller scale to the mid-market. Avaya boasts that IP Office can help mid-market businesses connect and collaborate in real time, using available and appropriate devices, including smartphones, laptops, tablets, home phones and office phones.

She adds that Avaya’s portfolio has widened to cover areas such as desktop video conferencing, for example, with its Scopia product, which is “getting a lot of interest because people can use it sitting at their desktop or on their iPhones or iPads”.

Mid-market alternative
Westcon is working with partners to provide them with the skills to sell into the mid-market and is also bringing new partners into the Avaya fold. Greene believes it will be attractive to partners selling other brands that “are looking for an alternative and are interested in the Avaya product’s scalability to move from an SME sale to the mid-market”.

Some of its existing partners are quite happy to stay in the SME space but slightly larger partners have shown a lot more interest in building up their skills to target the mid-market. “The enterprise area is getting smaller and the mid-market is growing,” Greene explains. Westcon has a LEAP [learn, experience, architect and plan] centre at Westcon’s European headquarters that enables us to provide multi-vendor demonstrations and training and also virtual training if that’s required.

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