The contract will cover fault management, frontline reporting, logging services and comprehensive maintenance support for HP's voice communications including PABX calls, mobile communications and voicemail.
HP expects the AU$1.8 million deal to save the company AU$360,000 per year and improve the technical support received by the company's 4,000 employees across 20 Australian sites and four New Zealand sites.
"This is a huge step forward for pre-merger HP employees in terms of the level of service they receive," said Craig Fitzgerald, HP's Voice Services Manager. He said the contract provided a more streamlined service to HP's internal users.
"Previously, HP employees only had access to technical support via email and had to navigate through an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system before reaching help," said Fitzgerald. "This meant that fault resolution could at times become a lengthy process. Now all employees have access to technicians 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and benefit from improved response times."
Avaya has opened a contact centre in Australia which will work concurrently with one based in the UK and another in the US, providing a typical "follow the sun" service. The 10 seat Australian centre will be supported by a 15 person team at a "centre of excellence". Avaya is targeting large enterprises with an offer of a "single point of accountability".
This would mark a reversal of the recent trend in outsourcing of using different vendors to outsource different parts of the business to.
"What we're seeing in the marketplace is clients looking to deal with one person for their infrastructure, not deal with four to five vendors," Bruce Batey, Regional Sales Manager, Managed Services, Avaya South Pacific told ZDNet Australia . Avaya offers to consolidate all of an enterprise's contracts and manage them on behalf of the client, who deals with Avaya through a single interface.
"With the single point, we're happy to either own the contract or manage the contract on the clients behalf," said Michael Clarkson, General Manager Services, South Pacific. He said companies now wanted their outsourcers to be more proactive in areas such as capacity management, and to recognise issues before they became a problem instead of after.
