We are seeing a significant upturn in sales on both the Avaya IP Office and their ECG products. The teams are doing a great job and a lot of the success is due to the coming together of Westcon and Comstor and the way in which we can now manage our resellers on a wider perspective. Resellers are looking for convergence solutions and value across the board and we are able to provide that from both our external sales teams and the reseller support infrastructure.”
Dawn Fenton, Westcon VoicePoint Manager, says that IP Office 3.2 has no significant news features but that Avaya MultiVantage Express (MVE) is attracting a lot of interest.
“MVE is causing a big stir in the market and provides users in the SMB space to pick up a convergence product at a very affordable price. It’s well positioned and enables users to step up from an IP Office without having to go to a full blown MultiVantage.”
“We are also seeing an upturn in ancillary products,” says Moulton, “such as Packeteer for bandwidth management. Here we are gaining business from PBX resellers as we are able to support them with this offering as well. Sales have nearly tripled in recent months.
On the Cisco Unified CallManager front we are seeing a real change in the SMB arena where the positioning and price points are starting to make the product more attractive. Cisco has designed these products around the SMB rather than the enterprise environment and we are seeing a lot of up-selling of security applications which indicates a broadening of the market.
In particular Westcon see the Cisco ASA 5500 Series adaptive security appliances selling well as they combine security and VPN services with Cisco Adaptive Identification and Mitigation (AIM) architecture. Sales have doubled in the last quarter.
James Clarke, Marketing Manager for the Group sees their training capability and resources as being a key differentiator. “We are seeing significant changes in our offerings. Resellers can bulk buy training and spread when they take it up. Additionally the facilities in Cirencester now address more that Cisco products and encompass a more complete set of products.”