Avaya and Airtel in Global Strategic Partnership

Avaya and Bharti Airtel Limited have signed a five-year partnership agreement to enhance Airtel's customer capabilities across its operations. This groundbreaking partnership - under the umbrella of Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions - will provide contact center technology and managed services designed to increase performance, reduce costs, and accelerate Airtel's communications environment transformation.

As per agreement, Avaya will provide a tailored contact center outsourcing environment that includes completely customized application support, billing, reporting, and service-level agreements with remediation. In addition, Avaya will be transforming Airtel's environment to the latest contact center technology, which will allow Airtel to provide a consistent, high-quality customer experience across all its verticals.

Best of Computing Comes to Phones

Intel Corporation and Lava International Ltd. have recently announced the general availability of the XOLO X900, the first smartphone with Intel inside. Lava has also announced its long-term partnership with Croma, a national chain of mega stores of consumer electronics and durables, for promotion and sale of the XOLO X900.

The partnership between Intel and Lava was announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. The XOLO X900 is based on Intel's smartphone reference design featuring the Intel Atom processor Z2460 with Intel hyper-threading technology and supporting HSPA+ 3G connectivity.

The high-performance 1.6 GHz Atom processor with hyper-threading technology brings speed and multi-tasking performance to consumers' fingertips. The leading-edge 400 MHz graphics clock and the full 1080p HD video encoding and playback make this phone a perfect entertainment device, providing users with an immersive gaming and video experience.

Fortinet Developes New Channel Initiatives

Fortinet has announced a series of channel initiatives that support the company's ongoing objective of creating value for, and getting commitment from, its resellers and distributors internationally. The additional programs and tools focus on education, profit, and proximity to help increase the expertise and profitability of Fortinet's channel partners across the EMEA and APAC regions.

The three key areas around which Fortinet developed its new channel initiatives are education, profit, and proximity. Fortinet's new Authorized Training Centers (ATCs) program is designed to provide additional sales benefits to existing ATCs and foster the presence of ATCs at the local level. This selective program evaluates the performance and commitment of each ATC and requires the provision of highly qualified instructors. The objective is to help increase the product expertise of Fortinet's reseller community through access to localized training on Fortinet's solutions.

The introduction of the deal registration tool aims at protecting channel partners who actively identify new business opportunities and comprehensively share them with Fortinet. With this automated tool, resellers are encouraged to further take leadership on sales opportunities while, in exchange, benefit from Fortinet sales and technical support knowledge to help close deals faster. Fortinet has also developed a simple and intuitive web-based interface, the renewal asset tracking tool, designed to help resellers identify renewal income opportunities through unit and subscription services tracking; view on FortiCare/FortiGuard contracts information; and identification of upgrade/upsell opportunities.