Avaya China is making great progress in transitioning towards the cloud. In the last 18 months, there have been a series of announcements with leading players in China to partner on delivering cloud-based solutions to the enterprise and midmarket segments. Chen Wei, China Sales Leader, Avaya, places recent announcements in context.

1. How Mobility is Driving Cloud Adoption in China
Avaya China is making great progress in transitioning towards the cloud. In the last 18 months, there
havebeen a series of announcementswith leading players in China to partner on delivering cloud-based
solutions to the enterprise and midmarket segments. Chen Wei, China Sales Leader, Avaya, places
recent announcements in context.
Tencent and Ucloud are some of the most recent strategic partners that we’ve been driving headline
news with. Please give us some context to these partnerships?
In the lasttwo years,China’stechnologylandscape has been moving to cloud, slowly but surely. While
there wasa strongpushand transformationof consumptionmodelsof technology,the markethasbeen
very receptive. First, it was the infrastructure wave wherein big players like Alibaba, Tencent and
Amazon have aggressively launched competing models of IaaS. Following them were applications
vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft, who have localised their hosting and delivery mechanisms to
overcome securityandperformance challengesandcapture that wave. Strategic alliances between the
infrastructure andapplicationsvendorsare now asolidstrategyinChinato capture that trend,andeven
smaller applications players are jumping on the opportunity.
On the demandside inChina,Mobilityreigns.Almostanyenterprise we talktoislooking beyond the PC
and tablet and wants to make sure that business applications are accessible on mobiles and
smartphones first and foremost. So what matters for China enterprises is to be able to deploy on a

2. mobile-first basis, with utmost simplicity, and with the ability to integrate with the existing social
communication platforms in China. From this perspective, mobility is the first and biggest driver for
cloud adoption in China.
We at Avaya have not been standing still. Looking at our own solutions, our target market, our
ecosystemof partnershipsandexecutionmodels,andthe demandinthe market,we formulated a solid
cloud strategy that we have begun executing on 18 months ago.
Can you expand on Avaya’s strategy towards cloud in China?
We looked at a transformation path that starts with Video-as-a-Service (VaaS), followed by CCaaS
(Contact Centre) and UCaaS (Unified Communications). For this to happen, we needed to look at our
ecosystemof partners,Avayadeliverymodels, andmake sure we have a bullet-proof execution strategy
that fits the traditional and Internet-born businesses. So far, I believe we are on the right track.
We took up VaaS first because of the simplicity in deployment coupled with the rich features of our
videotechnology.Thisapproachhas also helped us build enough experience to bring to the CC and UC
parts of our strategy.WithVaaS,we leveragedthe model toboostourmid-marketpresence andpacked
the solution with IPOffice. This allowed us to partner with the largest public cloud operators in China
such as China Telecom, with large hosting environments in large cities, and with an already-existing
large resellerchannel.To date,VaaShasgrown almost100 per cent on bothcustomerand partnerbase.
With CCaaS and UCaaS, our approach was different. Instead of targeting the small and medium
enterprise, on the CC side, we are going after the 200 to 500 agent customer. Key components of the
successof the outreachto these customers were customizationof the user experience, private hosting
environments, an ecosystem of applications with third-party partners, and delivering excellence in
execution. In short, we had to transform the way we build our go-to-market and the way we package
services around our offers. To date, we have strategic agreements with leading players in China
includingTencent,Ucloud tohave accessto the rightPaaS (Platform),SaaS(Software) andotherhosting
partners. All of these are businesses that have built expertise in the part of the as-a-Service
consumption model that they cover, and part of our ecosystem required to build the Avaya China
business in CCaaS and UCaaS. We also have built dedicated expertise within Avaya from system
engineers, andsalesandservices,todrive the monetization and excellence-in-execution components.
Since our publicannouncement on this, we have had tremendous interest from the enterprise market
and two customers are being on-boarded as we speak.
For UCaaS in specific,we are extremelykeentodrive thisforward,especially asournew featuresexceed
whatcompetitorsdeliver.We will followthe same strategybutstartinHong Kong,and leveragingAvaya
Zang. Hong Kong has a more established UC ecosystem that we are currently in discussion with.
Where do you see platformslike Breeze and Equinox playing a role in the Avaya China cloud strategy?
The most important fact is that customers currently want to shift focus from infrastructure to
applicationsandthe customerexperience.Thisisthe biggestchallenge aswell asopportunityforus.Itis
a challenge thatthe marketperceptionof Avaya is as an infrastructure vendor; but today, our story has
changed. The opportunity is that Breeze and Equinox are the right platforms that will help us deliver
compellingapplicationsandexperiencesandtoday,ourplatforms give usan edge overthe competition.
From that perspective,Breeze and Equinox are two platforms that are essential for us to complete the
cloud ecosystem and applications story.