Avaya expands India operations

Opens second global services delivery centre in India at Hyderabad.

US-based Avaya Inc, a provider of intelligent communication solutions to global enterprises, has opened its second global services delivery (GSD) centre in India at Hyderabad, with the first being in Pune.

The 60,000-sft facility, which has a capacity to accommodate 300 professional, would provide additional support to Avaya's initiative to supply expertise to customers on a full range of products round the clock across geographies, besides doubling up as a disaster recovery centre. The $5-billion (approximately Rs 20,000 crore) company has similar centres in the US and Budapest in Hungary.

"We have been developing India as a strategic market for Avaya since the last 10 years in terms of bringing in more work to the country and catering to the global requirements. We see Hyderabad as a way for accessing the vast talent pool in the South that Avaya intends to leverage to grow its presence in India, and we expect this facility to be as critical as our US centre," Niru Mehta, managing director and vice-president of Avaya India, told Business Standard.

Stating that the domestic IP telephony market is opening up new opportunities, with Indian enterprises increasingly going in for deployment of the service for their communications networks, Mehta said Avaya expected this penetration to grow significantly. Avaya in India currently enjoys 44 per cent and 37 per cent share in the IP telephony and contact centre services verticals respectively.

"We recognise the immense potential of the Indian market and the expansion of our business operations here is a natural progression. According to IDC, voice and data services among enterprises in India are expected to grow to $38-million (Rs 155.2 crore) by 2011. This is a significant indicator of India's ever-growing progress in the IT services industry. Hence, we plan to continue investing in further building up our capabilities in our India operations, including increasing our employee base at Pune substantially, from the present 900 to be able to support this growth," Mehta said.

Avaya, at present, employs close to 19,000 people, including 2,500 R&D professional worldwide. More than 90 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies use its solutions for IP telephony, unified communications, contact centres and communications-enabled business processes.

Its Indian operations contributed $150 million (Rs 600 crore) to its global revenues during the last October-to-September financial year.