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.

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