Despite the definite merger agreement between Avaya and Silver
Lake and TPG Capital, two leading investment firms, business is as usual at
Avaya India. At Avaya GlobalConnect, the focus is to enhance market presence
with more solutions for the domestic market, while the Avaya India Development
Center (Avaya India) is strengthening its R&D efforts to meet global
demands.
"We are still going through the process and expect
transactions to complete by October. We believe that the combination of Avaya,
SilverLake, and TPG will help us further accelerate our growth and provide
better services to our customers. India has been and will continue to be very
important for Avaya. We are delighted with the performance of the business in
India," says Niru Mehta, vice chairman and MD, Avaya GlobalConnect.
Avaya India is focusing on building a cutting-edge research
capability in India, coupled with a design and architectural competence that
will enable the company build and launch new products entirely out of India. It
is also working on a variety of technologies to provide multi-model
collaboration and communication, indexing, mining, and rendering relevant
contextual cues during communication.
In India, Avaya has two major entities-Avaya GlobalConnect,
the marketing vehicle, and Avaya India Development Center with two divisions:
R&D and Global Services Delivery. The ongoing transaction has not yet slowed
its focus in the country, and investments are set to pour into India through
both entities. "We have been investing and will continue to invest in
India. We are also deploying our global resources in India for R&D. Today,
more than 40% of the business comes from outside the US, and we would like to
increase that," Mehta adds.
Avaya's India R&D center is the fourth largest in the
world, and is growing rapidly. Nine R&D divisions and twenty-four products
are operating out of the India R&D center right now. "We feel that our
India operation is a great success since we have been able to attract and retain
a high-talent, high-energy, and highly-motivated workforce. From a humble
beginning six years ago, we are now managing entire products out of India. We
have a highly skilled tier-4 team in India that supports our customers
worldwide," says Vivek Tuljapurkar, MD, Avaya R&D.
Innovation is the Key
Innovation is the hottest topic in business, and a competitive advantage for
Avaya. Avaya is a descendent of AT&T Bell Laboratories and the Bell Labs'
tradition of innovation is very much alive here. The Avaya Labs' team
comprises more than 3,000 R&D engineers along with a core research team of
over sixty research scientists. The main charter of this team is technology and
product innovation, and, thanks to its contribution, Avaya has developed strong
leadership position in the area of enterprise communications.
"Our passion for innovation is the fuel that drives us and
we would not do anything to jeopardize it. Our leadership position, and indeed
our very existence, might depend on our passion and drive for innovation,"
says Tuljapurkar.
Some companies are well known for innovation, such as Google and
3M, which ask their employees to spend a certain percentage of time on projects
of their own without any guidance from peers.
There are merits to these approaches, which help foster the
spirit of innovation. From an engineering and technology standpoint, there are
three main areas of innovation: technology, product, and process. Avaya attempts
to address all three in various ways. It encourages its employees to submit
their ideas in informal sessions and then prioritize based on alignment with
customer needs, challenges, and requirements. Small virtual teams are created to
help develop prototypes for selected projects.
The company also encourages its employees to publish their work
and file patent applications. Besides, it has training programs and internal
workshops to keep employee skills at par with state-of-the-art technologies,
which they can then apply towards innovation. Successful employees are expected
to have significant customer interaction to learn about customer requirements,
leading to product innovation. Finally, all innovation is accompanied by
substantial rewards from both monetary and career-growth standpoints.
One of the customer requirements that Avaya helped with, both in
India and abroad, was to enhance employee productivity. Avaya noticed that
customers were manually dialing numbers that were present in electronic
documents such as the Web and office documents. The company developed the
technology to automatically detect such numbers or contact info in any kind of
documents so that users could initiate communication from their desk- or
cell-phone using a single click. This feature is known as
"click-to-communicate" and has been a highly desirable feature.
Challenges to Meet
Challenge is part of any innovation process, and Avaya is not an isolated
case. There are a number of challenging technologies that Avaya has worked on in
the past. Its ambition is to provide rich, intelligent, and multi-model
communication to all enterprise employees at the right place, on the right
device, and at the right time. The specific challenge here is to innovate to
help employees with special needs such as visual, hearing or other impairments.
"Today, more than 40% |
"Our leadership |
"The speed of ramp up |
||
-Niru Mehta, vicechairman and MD, Avaya GlobalConnect |
-Vivek Tuljapurkar, MD, Avaya R&D |
-Rajeev Shroff, seniorVP, Avaya Global Services Delivery |
Enterprises have evolved from being centralized to distributed,
and, in a vast number of cases, spanning multiple continents. Providing seamless
communication, working across multiple regulatory, cultural, and social
environments, with an easy-to-use interface and providing the tightest security
is certainly a very problem that keeps Avaya busy, excited, and challenged.
Is Avaya doing something innovative in the way it manages
researchers/research? According to Tuljapurkar, the bottom line is to provide
its employees the freedom and exposure: the freedom to learn and develop new
technologies and products, and the exposure to real-life customer issues, so
that the company knows which technologies and products to focus on.
While Avaya India has various initiatives for recruitment and
retention, Tuljapurkar feels the best way to attract best employees and retain
them is by providing them a challenging and rewarding work culture where they
can learn, grow, and build their careers. "There are no particular
challenges that we are facing. In fact, while the industry is rife with stories
of high-attrition and difficulties in recruitment, we have managed to counter
these challenges quite well, thanks to our culture. We believe that a happy
employee is a great help in recruitment and retention, so we focus on creating a
great number of happy employees," Tuljapurkar adds.
At Avaya, seniors try to make the interaction with a prospective
employee very personal, from day one, and are open in all communication.
"For instance, the last time we hired a senior level person, we invited him
to a brainstorming session with the rest of the team so he could get familiar
with the operating environment, culture, and the people. In turn, we could also
assess how he would fit into the organization. We have followed this method
successfully to bring several senior people into the organization and in most
cases do not leave scope for unusual surprises and a mismatch in
expectations," says Rajeev Shroff, senior VP, Avaya Global Services
Delivery.
Moving forward, the company plans to take this initiative for
every prospective employee wanting to work with Avaya, by encouraging
prospective employees to visit the organization and interact with employees on a
one-on-one basis, to get a feel of the culture. "The opportunities for
personal development that we offer at Avaya by encouraging higher studies
through 100% funding for high performers keeps our employees motivated and helps
us retain and develop talent," Shroff adds.
Avaya's GSD center in India along with its centers in the US
and Europe serve customers across global geographies through the follow-the-sun
model. Through this process the company has also been able to ensure that there
is work-life balance for employees, and to be able to alternatively leverage
centers around the globe.
An interesting fact to note is that though we are only a
two-year old organization, the India center makes a substantial contribution to
the Global backbone operations which is the highest level of support within
Avaya GSD.
Typically, when companies start a new center, the approach is to
replicate existing operations or business models as is, with a focus to achieve
the same level of productivity, quality, etc as existing centers. When Avaya
started its center in India, it modeled it on future needs of customers and the
future state of Avaya's support operations. Being a new center, the company
has taken a different route, and ramped up rapidly to build and implement its
Global Service model at the same time. "The speed of ramp up and quality
delivery is also attributed to factors like strong and large talent pool of
software engineers in India," Shroff adds.
In Focus |
|
Avaya's customers run their businesses on Avaya technology,
and depend on Avaya for providing high uptime for the communications
infrastructure and quick turnaround of solutions.
The company has focused on building capability to meet and
exceed these expectations. In the enterprise product support business, it is
important to build strong service orientation and win customer confidence. Since
customers are from different parts of the world, understanding the customer's
context and culture can be a challenge. Avaya focuses not only on training its
staff to provide effective technical support but also sensitize them on business
impact. This ensures that Avaya builds customer management capability,
communication skills, and not just language skills. Being able to relate to the
criticality of the situation, responding to needs and taking them up on
priority, goes a long way in ensuring customer satisfaction.
The company applies the Six Sigma methodology in its improvement
initiatives when serving its customers, through analysis of customer feedback,
making process changes, and refining Avaya's support model.
Bottlenecks
The focus of the top management is on equipping its employees with global
orientation, service orientation, professionalism, and process orientation to
exceed global standards and expectations. Here, in India, there is no dearth of
good technical talent and passion to excel, but the environment and education
does not foster strong service orientation and business acumen. One of the
biggest challenges is to convert the strong potential of engineers within a very
short period of time, requiring large investments in training. This increases
the time taken to groom a new engineer to the point where he can handle complex
issues, analyze critical customer situations, and provide rapid solutions.
Avaya's products are designed for a broad set of customers.
The company takes into account the requirements of customers across various
geographies and verticals. They are not designed for specific countries or
verticals but can be customized to meet the needs of a specific customer.
Considering that India is one of its largest markets and technology adoption in
India is getting to be at par with the rest of the world, Avaya India pays a
great deal of attention to the requirements of Indian customers and the emerging
trends in the Indian market.
Its customers are always looking for technology and products
that give them an edge over their competitors by improving their customer
responsiveness, streamlining their operations, etc.
The company is working with industry bodies to address and sort
out regulatory issues, which are considered the biggest bottlenecks that Avaya
faces today. The other challenge is to educate customers about benefits of IP
telephony which is today considered cost effective. The company needs to engage
the customers and tell them of the larger benefits of technology.
Baburajan K
(with inputs from Nilabh Jha)
baburajank@cybermedia.co.in