http://www.nojitter.com/post/240172156/avaya-ready-to-sell-off-contact-center-business
So Avaya may be selling off their contact center business and filing for Chapter 11 protection?
What does this mean to Avaya customers? Those of you who had Nortel and later became “Avaya Blue” customers went through this. Siemens ICN kind-of went through this as they changed to “Unify” and were bought a couple times.
Cisco has a huge advantage in enterprise telephony. They enjoy a great relationship with the network managers and can price their telephony solutions well under market since much of the infrastructure is already in place.
Anyway, some of you readers out there are Avaya customers, and some of you have gone through this before with Nortel. What do you think this means?
I loved the Nortel Option 11.
Similar but not the same situation. Enterprise Communications Technology has evolve to a more Open Architecture environment in the past few years, so “Avaya Blue” customers has many more options than they had in 2009. With SIP based and hardware agnostic solutions from new vendors like E-MetroTel, Nortel customers can migrate their current platforms while maintaining all their phones and existing applications without “touching a wire” in their buildings.
Thanks Mauricio. I spoke with my Avaya rep and he said this is a chance for them to get rid of about 6 billion in debt. Naturally, Avaya is going to see this as a good thing. Apparently they have plenty of cash, income, customer satisfaction rations, and potential. They’ve managed to reduce the debt incurred from the Nortel acquisition from 8 billion to 6 billion. But this will allow them to get rid of it.
Personally, I love the idea of supporting a phone system w/o touching a wire. But there’s so much that can go wrong with the LAN/WAN that I find myself busier than ever to try to troubleshoot, diagnose, and (hardest of all) demonstrate that the problem is NOT the phone system, but the underlying network. You know?