Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Avaya has introduced a new Avaya Services Delivery Specialization (SDS) program, which will help its channel partners to augment and showcase their ability to deliver a full range of lifecycle services for unified communications (UC) and contact centers.

 

With this newest program, Avaya BusinessPartners and AlliancePartners can provide services jointly with Avaya and demonstrate their capabilities in implementation, maintenance support, and application integration.  

 

Carol Giles Neslund, vice president for North America Channel Sales at Avaya, said that SDS enables channel partners to expand their portfolio of services with streamlined access to a broad range of Avaya tools, systems and people.

 

With SDS, he said, customers can quickly identify the channel partners that are the best fit for their project and be assured of their service's expertise.

 

The program has four areas of designation: implementation specialist; implementation professional; support specialist; and integration expert.

 

Implementation Specialist is for authorized Avaya BusinessPartners and AlliancePartners and will help them achieve advanced capabilities in implementation, while Implementation Professional is meant for “services only” Avaya channel partners that do not sell Avaya products and have achieved advanced capabilities in implementation services.

 

The Support Specialist designation is for Platinum, Gold and Silver-certified Avaya BusinessPartners and AlliancePartners with significant, cross-portfolio sales of Avaya products and solutions.

 

Officials said that Integration Expert is meant for Platinum, Gold and Silver-certified Avaya BusinessPartners and AlliancePartners with deep expertise in Avaya unified communications and/or contact center portfolios.

 

The company said that a number of Avaya BusinessPartners have already been designated SDS channel partners, including Carousel Industries, Cross Telecom, NACR and SPS.

 

The Platinum-certified Avaya BusinessPartner have received both the SDS Implementation Specialist and the SDS Support Specialist designations.

 

“Because SDS has such rigorous requirements, it offers customers a reasonable indicator of quality performance,” said Dick Bourdow, vice president for Central Region at NACR.