Businesses, especially, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), are moving into a remote working environment with the cost of communications coming down. Adoption of cloud technologies has increased and the concept of “home-office” has led to changed investment patterns across organisations, says Vishal Agrawal, MD, India and SAARC, Avaya India.

The company, he says, is ready with both hardware and software solutions to cater to this “Covid-19-induced new normal”. India continues to be amongst the top 10 markets globally for Avaya.

In an interaction with BusinessLine , Agrawal talks about the India business, adoption of new technologies post Covid-19, and cost of communication infrastructure, among others. Edited excerpts:

How big is India for you as a market?

Lot of investments will happen in India in the digital transformation space over the next two to three years.

While we do not share country-specific turnover, India is a strategically-important market for us and amongst the top 10 markets globally.

Also read: Covid has increased adoption of collaboration services, says MD of Avaya India

In terms of outlook, we believe that we are poised for double-digit growth for Avaya here for the current fiscal that began October 1. We see increasing demand for our cloud-based communication solutions across both larger organisations and small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Avaya is also investing in hiring people, towards channel growth and bringing in products relevant to the Indian market.

Are organisations, both large and small, willing to make new investments in communications?

As the Covid-19 situation gets stabilised, a hybrid work culture is evolving in offices.

Some people will work from offices, some will work from homes. Work from anywhere will be the new normal. Online on-boarding of new employees is happening. That would mean organisations will have to ensure that there is seamless communication between employees, wherever they are located. There will be a lot of investments and products coming in around home-offices with video equipment devices and technology will move to cloud.

Moreover, with the Centre relaxing rules for ITeS it will help create jobs in small towns in India.

In the SMBs, digital adoption will increase. From EPABX machines to other communication devices and digital platforms, these businesses are already opting for seamless communication solutions. Pilots across different organisations are already being carried out.

A lot of solutions will come around the data processing and security part.

Earlier, communication infrastructure was heavy on investments, but now it will move to consumerisation, thereby being a cost-effective model. In terms of cost, communication will become more affordable as consumerisation takes place. Days of building mega boardrooms or having multiple video-walls in offices will change, primarily across large organisations.

I personally believe consumers will look for optimum value and outcome. In fact, outcome loyalty will gain traction rather than people preferring brands.

So will customer-engagement patterns change?

Voice will always remain critical. But, it will get enriched with video-calling. Voice will come at a premium. Engagements will be through voice-bots or chat-bots and such artificial intelligence will come into play. There could be more machine to human interactions in segments like the service industry, for insurance premium renewals, for flight and hotel bookings, and so on. Many SMBs, which previously sold through human interactions, will look to adopt digital channels.

With increasing adoption of cloud technologies and software-based communication solutions, how is Avaya – once a pureplay hardware maker – changing its offerings?

As an organisation we have remained neutral. We can provide any solution in a multi-cloud set-up. What is working well for us, we constantly innovated and collaborated even with start-ups to bring in new solutions. We have made the transition and our solutions can pretty much work with any software or cloud system. Yes, we still do sell hardware servers and gateways.

However, the software runs on hardware, and the latter, that include devices, will remain intact. Rather, devices will be high-end to provide communication experience to users. It will be something like mobile phones. As technology improved from 2G to 4G, people started upgrading from feature phones to smartphones.

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