Q&A with Avaya’s Channel Chief Carol Giles Neslund

Last fall Avaya Inc. brought in new channel leadership, tapping Carol Giles Neslund as its vice president of channels for North America. The former Seagate channel executive reports to Jeremy Butt, who was took over as Avaya's vice president of Worldwide Channels in June 2008. Together the two are gearing up for a relaunch of the Avaya Business Partner Program with an eye toward simplicity, global consistency and channel-centricity. PHONE+ spoke to Neslund in early June about the changes in the 2009 channel in preparation for a global relaunch Oct. 1.

What has your past experience brought to the Avaya channel?

I always look at the way a company executes in the channel as a function of two things: The first thing is the value proposition that our product offers end-user customers. What business need or business problem or do we help end-user customers solve that creates demand for our product in the marketplace? So, for example, Avaya Aura does a lot in this environment especially toward cost reduction, toward facilitating enhanced real-time communications in an enterprise, enabling people to get in touch with each other when they need to.

The value proposition is one piece of the equation. From my perspective — I’ve had this as a theme across my career in the channel — the second piece is the business proposition for a channel partner to do business with Avaya. They make money on our value proposition. That’s what they do. They go sell to end users our product offering, but they are not going to do that unless they can make money doing it, right? Fundamentally if you want to know what’s going on in the channel, you need to follow the money. Where are business partners able to make money, on whose technology and how quickly can they do that, how sustainable is their ability to do that?

So, one of the things that we are very intensely focused on in the channel organization is shoring up that business proposition. So, this has been a year of planning and development and really getting ready — you’ll see some of this toward the end of summer and beginning of fall — to rethink and streamline our global channel framework and rolling out a simplified program that will really allow partners to quickly understand the benefit and business value of being an Avaya partner and to be able to get about the business of growing their business and generating revenue in a sustainable way.

One of the big things we have been doing is putting the infrastructure underpinnings in place, so we can lay the program framework and some enhanced ways of interacting with the company on top of it. We have been engaged in implementing a sales-out reporting system and partner relationship management (PRM) system. ...We just went live with sales-out reporting in March. In April we rolled out Salesforce.com [and] a piece of that was the PRM system for our partners. In its first generation, it’s a place for them to get content about Avaya products. It’s a place to enter info to be part of the Avaya Partner Finder, which will go live in July. It’s a way to submit requests for things like MDF funding and business cases and business plans in a centralized location. It’s a very elemental rollout of PRM that will be expanded throughout the summer and fall to the relaunch of our channel program.