With more than 3 million units deployed in 150 countries, Alvarion is the world’s leading provider of innovative WiMAX and wireless broadband network solutions, designed to enable personal broadband in order to improve lifestyles and productivity with portable and mobile data, VoIP, video and other services.
As a wireless broadband pioneer, Alvarion has been driving and delivering innovations for almost 15 years from core technology developments to creating and promoting industry standards. Leveraging its key roles in the IEEE and HiperMAN standards committees and with experience in deploying OFDM-based systems, the company’s prominent work in the WiMAX Forum is focussed on increasing the widespread adoption of standard-based products in the wireless broadband market and leading the entire industry to Open WiMAX solutions.
VARIndia met with Moshe Faran, Regional Manager India, Alvarion, to know about the company’s focus.
Moshe said, “We emphasize working closely with our channel partners via training and marketing programmes. Training and certification is scheduled on a regular basis and is usually a three-day course. We also do many workshops with SIs as well as with telcos and service providers in India.”
The company is already working directly with carriers such as Bharti and AirCel on the Telco side and is in talks with the rest of the service providers. This has so far been the company’s strategy, but of late Alvarion has equally emphasized its vertical business focussing on PSUs like oil and natural gas sector, government, defence, police department, security solution providers, etc. In this business, the company takes the channel route.
Moshe adds, “India is a very important market for Alvarion. We are strengthening our focus on vertical markets and there is an excellent professional team here to support this effort. Even though a large portion of our business stems from telcos, we believe that our increased efforts in the vertical market space with our channel partners will prove to be successful for Alvarion.”
Alvarion currently works with two distributors. When asked why, Moshe answered, “We have been happy with our relationship with our current two partners, and have been successful with our business here. Alvarion as a company understands the importance of having a number of distributors in most markets to ensure that we are bringing to the table the proper expertise and relationships necessary to provide our customers with the best available resources.”
The strategy of the company is to empower the channel partners and the customers with Alvarion’s best-of-class products, extensive training and excellent support. The company has a virtual training centre in its website by the name of Alvarion Training Centre (ATC). The partners can log in and complete the course for certification. Besides, the company updates them on the new technology on a regular basis. Moving on the likes of industry practice, the company also from time to time provides attractive sales incentives to partners.
Addressing the concern of the customers relating to support, Moshe says, “Alvarion, along with its ecosystem of partners, provides end-to-end support to the customers. Level -1 and -2 support is provided by the partners and Alvarion provides level-3-4 support. In addition, Alvarion plans to have other support mechanisms on the ground by the end of the year to focus on testing and solution POC.”
Alvarion emphasizes on educating partners in India
