Avaya and HP today announced a new three-year agreement for HP's services arm to bring Avaya's complete product portfolio into the set of solutions they sell for Unified Communications and collaboration.
The announcement follows a similar one between HP and Alcatel-Lucent last month, which similarly focused on HP's services divisions--the former EDS and HP's Technology Services arm. It also builds on the companies' existing relationship by including, in the three-year pact, joint intellectual property development and knowledge transfer, and HP's use of some Avaya services in the go-to-market effort.
The companies cited a customer, Underwriters Laboratories, as an example of the fruits of these joint efforts (see here for more on UL's UC deployment). As I noted in that UL blog, Underwriters Laboratories' executives were much more focused on business results and organizational alignments than on the nitty-gritty of the technology. That's a theme that HP's Jay Chitnis amplified when I spoke with him (along with Avaya's Bruce Mazza) about the new partnership:
"The technology is not really the discussion," Jay Chitnis told me. "The discussion is understanding the people and process impacts, and ROI." Working with HP's consultants, UL was able to leverage its existing Avaya product base to start updating its infrastructure for UC, Jay added.
Bruce Mazza added that Avaya Aura is an especially good product for a consultative services company like HP, because of Aura's strong focus on bringing multiple vendors' communications infrastructure into a single framework that new UC capabilities can then be built on top of.
While previous joint sales and deployments were more "opportunistic," the new 3-year agreement includes provisions for joint training, and sets benchmarks for success of the effort at the end of the three-year term, Jay Chitnis and Bruce Mazza said.
