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Sonus will announce its enterprise channel strategy in the coming weeks, Sonus' Abbott said, and it's the company's intent to have a high-touch model but sell 100 percent through partners to enterprise customers. Pricing for its SBCs will be on a per-session basis depending on customer needs.
Sonus sells mostly direct to its large telco customers, with some partners -- mainly systems integrators -- participating. But Abbott said that in addition to its enterprise program, Sonus has also been introducing solution providers into its service provider coverage model, especially to tier-2, -3, and -4 type carriers whose requirements bear some resemblance to large enterprises wrestling with SIP and cloud infrastructure.
Sonus will remain selective, he said.
"This isn't 'open the door and sign up a lot of partners,'" Abbott said. "But, we are looking to expand our coverage. We're focused on the ease of doing business for the channel. We will never compete with our channel partners."
Sonus, which reported $259.7 million in revenue for its fiscal 2011, is also continuing to hire as the company expands.
Particularly notable is the number of Avaya alumni that have joined Abbott and Sonus in the past year, including well-known former Avaya executives such as Wes Durow, now vice president of global marketing, and Nancy Maluso, vice president and general manager, communications applications. Joseph McLaughlin, a former channel chief for Novell, BMC, Open Text and IBM, joined Sonus in April as vice president, global channels.
With widespread adoption of SIP only now hitting its stride, the opportunities for SBC and technologies that benefit from SIP infrastructure will expand, Abbott said. He likened the current customer embrace of SIP to what the industry went through in the early days of Internet Protocol and how that created demand for other technologies that made IP-based capabilities easier.
"If you go back to the early days of IP, we didn't have a good understanding of how the routing backbones needed to scale," he said. "If you think about cloud-based UC, this is the complexity of delivering a session that's truly comprised of all the UC components, whether that's voice, video or data. The complexity of scaling the edge of the network -- it really hasn't realized its true hype because of the lack of SIP-based infrastructure. So a fit-for-purpose company like Sonus is positioned to lead the industry."
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