Jan Lawford, Senior Director, EMEA channels at Avaya, told Comms Business Magazine, “The programme is designed to help our partners win more contracts with global organisations. Increasingly businesses are looking to role out IT projects across their global estate. Multinational Channel Deal is designed to help our partners respond to these large scale opportunities without the need to invest heavily in new markets where they don’t traditionally have a presence.”
According to Lawford the program is really simple to operate, “An Avaya business partner fills out a quick form to confirm that the opportunity adheres to the Multinational Channel Deal criteria.
Providing it does, a dedicated in-house Avaya team under the direction of Mary Whittle, Director of Worldwide Channel Development, will then work with the partner to structure a proposal that addresses the customer’s specific needs.
That includes finding relevant in country partners with the right skills set to fulfil the customer’s requirements locally and ensuring that the deal is tax efficient for customer but doesn’t contravene any tax laws. In so doing, the aim is to reduce the time and resource historically spent by partners tackling complex administration and legal hurdles. By removing the bottlenecks which prevent partners submitting complete, comprehensive proposals in a timely manner we are helping our partners become even more competitive in the market.”
Avaya says Multinational Channel Deal is a response to partner feedback and the changing way in which customers are buying and implementing our solutions. Increasingly CIO’s are centralising their infrastructure design, administration, budgets, and procurement processes in order to gain better control of their infrastructure. As a result, customers are looking to solution providers and vendors to facilitate the centralized acquisition of technology to be deployed across their multi-national organisations.
Lawford adds, “Our aim is to relieve partners of the pain and complexity that is often part of structuring proposals of this nature. Once we are sure that the deal fulfils the Multinational Channel Deal criteria, which can take as little as 48 hours, the Avaya in-house team will then work with the partners to deliver a complete, comprehensive proposal allowing the partner to get on with business as usual while Avaya does all the heavy lifting.
The important point to note is that Multinational Country Deal is designed to provide partners with assistance, not to take control of the deal. The partner still remains the main point of contact for the customer.
As part of the trial it has already helped partners implement projects in as few as 5 countries to a project that will be deployed across 65 countries in the next 12 months. Previously partners and customers would establish independent relationships within each of the countries, now, the Multinational Channel Deal allows to happen as, effectively, one transaction.”
The company says Multinational Channel Deal is available to any partner putting together a customer proposal that spans more than three countries outside of that partner’s authorised territory and which is sufficiently complex enough to warrant additional support. The opportunity must also originate in the country where the partner has a presence and experience of the products they are recommending. This program is not intended to allow a business partner to solicit business in a non-authorised territory.