Avaya: Taking the R&D Route

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.

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.

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