Posts tagged BANKRUPTCY

Last week I spent a day up in Basking Ridge, NJ at the Avaya’s global headquarters. The purpose of the visit was to delve deeper into the product roadmap (details man, details!) and talk about the recently announced PASS program that Avaya and it’s voice resellers are implementing on July 1, 2010 regarding voice maintenance and support contracts.

While the discussions were covered by a non-disclosure agreement there wasn’t a lot of information that hasn’t already been disclosed in either the product roadmap presentations or other material released by Avaya. With that said there were some technical details on how Avaya plans to integrate the CS1000 with their Aura platform. Unfortunately I can’t really go into the details… especially since a few of the Avaya presenters actually mentioned this blog in my discussions with them. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not? I guess so far so good, and I haven’t yet received any DMCA take down notices.

In any case I thought I would give my opinion on the current state of the Avaya/Nortel marriage. In general I try to avoid posting articles based solely on opinion. I’m much more comfortable basing my discussions on facts and theories that can be proven or dis-proven rather than just subjecture and assumptions. It’s almost expected that in any large acquisition there are bound to be bumps in the road… to date I haven’t seen any as a former Nortel customer. There haven’t been any product supply or support issues and the pricing and discount models  (post Avaya) have remained virtually unchanged. In fact last week we just stood up another CS1000E with 500+ IP phones and 36 Ethernet Routing Switch 5520s with a single Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 at the core at a newly constructed corporate office. So it would appear that it’s definitely business as usual when working with Avaya to procure Nortel hardware and support. Unfortunately not everything has been all roses. I learned last week that Avaya had it’s first round of employee cuts where it eliminated some redundant positions that came about through the Nortel acquisition.

In my opinion it’s seems that Avaya is on the right course and is dedicated to retaining the existing Nortel user base and even growing that user base. The next critical step is in the actual integration of the different product offerings… how will a Nortel CS1000 communicate with the Avaya Aura platform and how will Avaya leverage the existing Nortel investment? Having sat through those presentations last week I’m fairly confident that Avaya won’t let their Nortel customers down.

Let me know what you think?

Has the transition been seamless for you and your organization?

Are you on board with the Nortel/Avaya product roadmap or have you already decided to jump ship? (I think I see a good poll question in that last one)

Cheers!

Well if you’re like a lot of us today you probably didn’t see much. I was unable to connect myself and know of three other people around the country that were also unable to connect.

Here’s the response from Avaya when I questioned them on it;

Were you aware that many Customers could not gain access to your presentation?
Please accept our apologies. Due to unprecedented demand, we experienced technical issues. The replay will be available today at 3:30pm ET, using the same link. You can also view the replay on-demand beginning 9:00am, Thursday, January 21, and will be available on demand for 6 months. It can be accessed using the same URL, user id and password that you received when you registered.

I’m in the process of trying to download the presentation and all the material. I’m hoping that I can sift through all the slides and marketing and get to the real meat, which I can then post here. In short the existing data product roadmap is getting adopted by Avaya – although I believe it’s fair to ask what is/was the data product roadmap? Let’s see it! It was obvious that the voice solutions were going to be the big issue. I heard/read that the CS1000 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon but I only heard about future support for the 1120e and 1140e IP phones, what about the millions of i2002/i2004 IP phones? I also did’t see much about the BCM/SRG other than a comment that it would continue to be manufactured into 2011.

If you’ve seen the keynote and had time to digest the information please go ahead and comment. I will update this post with additional thoughts and comments when I’ve had an opportunity to read through all the material. Hopefully I’ll be able to see the beginning of the keynote presentation today at 3:30PM.

Cheers!

Update: January 19, 2010 3:30PM

Looks like the presentation will now be available at 4:00PM as opposed to the previously announced 3:30PM.