The Business Year

Search
Close this search box.
Fernando Ruiz Galindo

MEXICO - Telecoms & IT

Fernando Ruiz Galindo

Director, Avaya

Bio

Fernando Ruiz-Galindo holds a degree in Electronics and Communications, Telecommunications and IT Engineering from Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and he did a Senior Management Program at IPADE. Fernando Ruiz-Galindo is Managing Director at Avaya Mexico where he has held important leadership positions in Mexico and in the Latin American Region. Before, he was the leader of Enterprise Sales in Mexico where he was responsible for relations with the largest companies in the Mexican market, covering all segments of the private sector, including the financial sector; commercial; industry; services, among others. He also served as Cloud Sales leader, a position in which he stood out for his management skills and excellent results in negotiating the most important Cloud projects throughout the Americas International region (Canada and Latin America).

“During the pandemic we focused on selling technology to help companies adapt to remote work.“

What role does Mexico play for the international business strategy of Avaya?

Mexico is the top country in the Latin American market, and around 40% of the revenue of Latin America comes from Mexico. The entire Latin American market represents around 8% of the global revenue worldwide. The most important country for Avaya is the US, which makes up 57%% of the global revenue. In terms of country, Mexico has recently ranked in the top 10 most important countries in terms of revenue globally but that varies depending on the quarter or year.

How was your business impacted by the pandemic, and how did you help players adapt to the new normality?

During the pandemic we focused on selling technology to help companies adapt to remote work and provided tools for contact centers and customer experience solutions. Teleperformance, for example, is the largest contact center in the world and is one of our largest customers globally. We realized that many companies were not ready for this sudden change, so during this period we worked to help these customers as much as possible. We launched many campaigns of providing licensing and other consulting services free of charge for a period of 90 days to 6 months. For contact centers for example, the licenses that we provided free of charge was around 18,000 licenses in Mexico. We support them in many ways, like trying to provide guidance to shifts their teams to working from home. That was the most impactful thing we did during that period. It was not something that was monetized or sold in terms of our results, though it helped us position ourselves in a positive way in our market. There was the second phase of the pandemic, where companies started realizing this wave would be longer than expected. We started working on projects and definitions of what the model of the new company would be in 2021 and on. We started these discussions last year because many things had to change in terms of processes, the way of doing things, and so on. We provided a great deal of consulting services and held many conversations with our customers to prepare budgets and new ways of working starting in 2021. The third part of the pandemic is what we started seeing in 1Q2021, where companies were really making changes in terms of the new model of their companies. Right now, we are closing many projects that started a year ago in terms of discussions, and this has resulted in positive results for the company globally. As other technology companies adopted this global strategy, from our perspective it has been positive. The value of our stock increased around 4.3 times from February 2020 to February 2021. Some of our customers already had our technology and had a way to move forward. In addition, there were many of our products that were interesting for this situation but were not exploited prior to the pandemic as they are right now. The future of the company is bright, and our stakeholders are seeing that it is not something that long term but happening now. From our perspective, we have two main areas where we provide technology. The first is communications and collaboration services and all the telephony services in the company from many years ago. This has evolved on different platforms. We have a platform called Avaya Spaces that is a collaboration platform that allows video collaboration and content sharing. It is called Spaces because you create and share spaces on the platform. This platform was also launched before the pandemic exploded in 2020, so it was already planned. We already had the product but are currently seeing a big expansion. We see a big future for Spaces because it has transformed into a collaboration platform to be the replacing end point.

What factors are behind your success providing solutions for customer experience?

The other piece where we are successful in and are first in the market is the contact center solutions space. In 2019, we had 40% of the market in Latin America and around 44% in Mexico. In this new environment, a contact center is also important for marketing, selling, providing technical support, support areas, for projecting, billing, and many more areas. We are growing significantly in that space, and our solution right now is flexible. We have launched solutions completely as a service in the contact center space. We see a positive future in that area because in the past only large companies invested a big amount of money in a technical support group or a contact center solution. Now, even a mid-sized or small company needs a way to communicate with customers, receive calls from customers, and conduct communication on WhatsApp, Google, Facebook, or other social media. Many companies need to invest in this technology now. It is much more than just communication; it is a way to give customers an experience at the end. We are growing a lot in that space and in different markets and different verticals like the finance sector.

What are your main goals and objectives for Mexico for the next year?

First, we want to make sure our existing customers create their new technology environment to adapt to the new reality or new way of doing business after the pandemic; they need to transform their companies to be “Experience Builders” for their customers. Second is to make our technology accessible to smaller businesses that now require more technology to survive in this competitive environment. After the pandemic, this will only continue to increase. Third is to be able to create an environment of what we call multi-experience. Our concept of multi-experience it to provide tools that extend from the customer to the employee and vice versa. This is the technological ecosystem that you need to build in your company to provide a “Total Experience to your customers. Companies need someone that is able to help to build this environment, which we can. We integrate with many others, and we have alliances with other companies. The new real important business in the technology space will be integrating solutions to build tailor-made ecosystems for companies and provide the right response to the needs of the digital customers of today.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

You may also be interested in...

MX23_AG_SNAC_Alejandro copy

MEXICO - Agriculture

Alejandro Martínez

Interview

General Secretary, National Food and Commerce Union (SNAC)

MX24_AG_MEZFER_Luis

MEXICO - Agriculture

Luis Enrique Miranda Arredondo

Interview

Managing Director, Mezfer Crown

Screenshot 2023-09-25 at 06.31.49

MEXICO - Telecoms & IT

Ray Fletcher

Interview

CEO, Fermaca Networks

View All interviews

Countries

Countries

Become a sponsor