As with the sale of Nortel’s wireless division, Avaya is now the “stalking horse” for the enterprise division. I had heard that Avaya had walked away from the table but I guess for $475 million it’s too cheap to resist.
With the overlap of voice solutions I’m really curious how this will play out with the voice solutions. As for the networking components I don’t believe Avaya has much of anything so it should certainly help them sell complete solutions.
Cheers!
References;
http://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100259133&locale=en-US
http://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corporate/pressroom/pressreleases/2009/pr-090720.htm
http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2009/07/20/mike-z-s-zmail-about-nortels-enterprise-sale/
http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2009/07/20/nortel-to-sell-enterprise-business-to-avaya/
Does this mean Avaya takes over the Switching business ? (ERS 8600, Baystack, etc)
In short yes. Nortel’s Enterprise division is composed of their voice and data products and solutions.
Thanks for the comment!
My worry is really the voice product line. How long will Avaya run basically a competing hardware/software solution to whatever they have? It would be nice if someone familiar with the Avaya product matrix would come up with a side-to-side product comparison between the Avaya and Nortel product lines.
I guess it comes down to “What can I, as an end customer, do?” I’ve hitched my ride for the last 10 years to Nortel telephony gear. It won’t quit running tomorrow. But I have to know where I go from here. Spend lots of $$$ to upgrade and find out next year its all EOL?
” I’ve hitched my ride for the last 10 years to Nortel telephony gear. It won’t quit running tomorrow. But I have to know where I go from here. Spend lots of $$$ to upgrade and find out next year its all EOL?”
I feel your pain, as we are in the same boat. In fact, we are getting to purchase some SRGs.
We just upgraded our PBX and VM system last year and also last year made a major upgrade to replace ES 8100s with ERS 4500s, etc. I believe our network is fairly resilient and redundant. Unless our company is going to replace all that hardware (and at considerable expense I might add), my position is that we will continue to run our existing Nortel hardware even if it is EOLd. There is a considerable secondary market of Nortel hardware and I would expect that market to grow.
I’ve already had calls from Cisco and Enterasys about having them come in to discuss their solutions. I told them both no thanks. I’ll say the same to Avaya unless they come to discuss *Nortel* solutions. There’s no way I could go to my company and suggest they replace existing Nortel hardware with Avaya hardware. That’s simply not a viable solution. New for the sake of new is not a good business model in my book. What we have works and works well. I’d need a very compelling reason to move away from a working network solution.
We have an extensive Nortel data network, in addition to the Nortel voice network. I don’t believe Avaya has an extensive data portfolio, so if the sale ends of going through, they now have an extensive data portfolio, with a foothold in high-reliability market segments, healthcare and education. They immediately can provide an end-to-end solution for their voice side.