Q&A: Avaya and the 2006 FIFA World Cup - July 2006  

Avaya, a global provider of business communications applications, systems and services, was the Official Convergence Communication Provider at the 2006 FIFA World Cup, responsible for pulling every player and match together within a major communication network. The converged network - which combined voice and data on the same infrastructure - connected the 12 host stadia, the stadium media centres in Munich, Berlin and Dortmund and the FIFA headquarters in Berlin. Players, coaches, volunteers and fans alike benefited from the network that was used to issue accreditations for players and journalists, report results, track materials and inventory, confirm accommodation at FIFA's official hotels, and maintain security systems. Towards the end of the tournament, S&T spoke to Jocelyne Attal (JA), Avaya’s chief marketing officer and Doug Gardner (DG), Avaya’s FIFA World Cup Programme managing director.

Q: How did Avaya get involved in the FIFA World Cup?

DG: “In October 2000, Avaya was spun out of Lucent Technologies and we were looking for a platform for branding. The FIFA World Cup was an ideal platform as it had global reach, a presence in all the countries we operate in as well as worldwide appeal. The showcasing of our technology and solutions we thought would be very beneficial for Avaya.”

What’s involved in the sponsorship?

DG: “We’re a sponsor of FIFA but we also have an obligation to design, build, deploy and operate the IT solution for all the World Cup venues in Germany.”

JA: “We’re a B2B company and therefore not consumer-facing. Therefore it made sense to offer FIFA a solution that demonstrated our skills and capacity within technology solutions. On the marketing side, we are making sure that our customers know what we are doing. Soccer is a great platform for us, especially outside the United States.”

What have you been doing to leverage your sponsorship during this specific campaign?

JA: “We started working intensively two years ago on what our solutions would be to our customers. What’s interesting for us is to show the world for 31 days that we can manage the largest network globally. We started marketing the World Cup concept around the same time. So we’ve had two years to talk about what we would be doing for fans, what we would be doing for FIFA and what we would be doing for the reporters etc. We are also showcasing our services to 16,000 customers – more than 10 times the amount we did on Korea/Japan in 2002 – this is through briefings and then being at the stadiums and seeing how everything works in a very stretched environment. We have the advantage in Germany of being in a continent that is very focused on football. I have also been amazed at the attraction of this event to the US. Interest is much bigger there than four years ago.”

Is your business model the same as for ATOS and the Olympic Games? Cash plus value-in-kind?

JA: “Yes, we have the same business model. We also have metrics to measure the return on investment that we’ll have out of this World Cup. We have put together what we call the ‘dashboard’ for the World Cup which will measure awareness, consideration, preference and conversion of leads. We will analyse all the metrics when the World Cup is finished in July.”

What has been the biggest challenge in this World Cup in terms of day-to-day operations?

DG: “One of the big challenges was the late finish of the Bundesliga in Germany. It didn’t finish until 14th May so we didn’t get access to some of the stadiums until the middle of May. We had a very compressed timeline to do the deployment and installation in the venues. I would have liked another month. The other main challenge we faced was FIFA’s requirements change and increase right up until just before the opening match. It is very difficult for FIFA to specify exactly how may phones, how many ports etc they need. So we were still making changes and additions right up until the opening match in the first week.”

Are new technologies such as VOIP and WiFi important to showcase at an event of this size?

DG: “Yes, they definitely are. In 2002, we really just experimented with VOIP in Korea and Japan with our traditional PBX-IP enabled system. But for this World Cup, the network has been completely converged. Everything is IP and it’s one single wide area network and one single LAN, so they are not separate as in a traditional business.”

Does a single network mean it’s easier for things to go wrong though?

DG: “It’s all been built into the way we’ve designed redundancy and functionality. The way the network has been designed is that it is managed and administered from Munich, but if we lost connectivity to a stadium or venue they can still operate on their own without the wide area network until the latter is restored. For the voice solution, we are using one of our new solutions called Enterprise Survival Solutions which is centralised management control so that if you lose connectivity, all the nodes can operate independently without a connection to the main system.”

Have there been any problems to date?

DG: “Nothing apart from some of the German stadiums having trouble with power adages and minor problems with back-up power supplies but that hasn’t had any impact for the users at all.”

How closely have you been working with the other technology partners at the World Cup?

DG: “The four technology partners of FIFA are ourselves, Deutsche Telekom, Toshiba and Yahoo. We have worked extremely well with them and FIFA has a committee called the Network Planning Committee that is responsible for the network and we co-chair that committee with Deutsche Telekom and we have a very good relationship with them both at the management level and at the working level. We have been operating like we are one organisation, because that’s what we have had to do to make it work.”

What other sponsorships does Avaya undertake?

JA: “Our main sponsorship in the US is with the White Sox in Major League Baseball. This is similar to our World Cup sponsorship as we provide a normal sponsorship as well as a complete technology solution. We also undertake a lot of hospitality programmes.”

Finally, what will you take away from the World Cup?

DG: “For us, it has been the experience and the learnings from what we have done in designing and building the network. That’s a lot of learnings that we will take back into the business and create ‘best of breed’ practices. One of the things we have done with this event is partner with Extreme Networks and we now have a lot of experience in integrating Extreme data switches into our solutions.”

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