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A 28-year industry veteran with a resume that includes Comverse, Compaq, Nortel and Motorola, Navin Mehta joined Polycom in August as senior vice president, global services.
In an interview with CRN earlier this week, Mehta said Polycom has no desire to compete with its partners on services, and his role will be to expand Polycom's services offering beyond "product-attach" services -- or, installation, deployment, support and maintenance-type services -- and more sophisticated offerings many Polycom solution providers are equipped for.
"We feel that quite a few of our partners are ready to step up and say, 'Yes, we have the capabilities and the knowledge and the resources to make tha thappen,'" Mehta said. "We'd like to offer that service and subcontract it back to you, maybe in a white label. We're looking at doing it different ways, and being clear and open and transparent with partners."
Mehta said Polycom's services organization will approach the channel in "sell to," "sell with," and "sell-through" opportunities. He has spent his first weeks, Mehta said, talking with Polycom partners about the types of opportunities they'd like to see.
"As you know, the service function probably spends the most time with the end customer," he said. "A service person normally gets involved with a customer at the tail end of a sale and remains with that customer till the end of [the deal's] life. So there's the customer intimacy that comes with it."
The services strategy will be a "regular drumbeat" at Polycom during the next year, Mehta said, and partners will start seeing a lot of Polycom's new services opportunities starting in early 2012.
Mehta, who was most recently vice president of professional and application services at Motorola, reports to Sudhakar Ramakrishna, executive vice president and general manager of UC solutions and Polycom's chief development officer.
Ramakrishna is himself a former Motorola executive, and, like Hayden, joined Polycom a year ago as part of Polycom's ongoing executive makeover under CEO Andrew Miller. Mehta's predecessor in the services role was Alan Rudolph, who in March left Polycom after seven months to become a partner at SunGard Availability Services.
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