I'm a little late to blogging on Avaya's recent announcement of a partnership with HP ProCurve, to put Avaya Communications Manager software on server blades in Series 5400zl and 8200zl ProCurve switches. At a high level, this looks like exactly what everyone's been talking about in terms of communications moving to a software model that runs on generic hardware. But it's not entirely that simple, as I learned when I talked with Michael Frendo, GM of Unified Communications at Avaya.I hadn't spoken with Michael since 2004, when he represented Cisco in the VoiceCon Great Debate. That was an annual highlight of VoiceCon in the early years of the VOIP migration, when various Cisco execs would go up against a speaker from one of the legacy vendors, usually Phil Edholm of Nortel. In the early years of the debate's history, Phil would pretty thoroughly eviscerate Cisco over the technology's relative immaturity, but not surprisingly, as companies like Nortel and Avaya became strong advocates of VOIP themselves, there was less to debate about, and the spirit of coopetition, to use the old buzzword, kept the likes of Microsoft and Cisco from squaring off against each other. Michael held his own very handily when he and Phil faced off.
But so much for Memory Lane; Michael Frendo is now one of the ex-Cisco people that Charlie Giancarlo has brought into Avaya, along with Dr. Alan Baratz, senior VP and president, Global Communications Solutions and, for that matter, the new CEO, Kevin Kennedy. And Michael was the Avaya point person at HP's ProCurve alliance announcement, in which the up-and-coming switch vendor made the latest bid to assemble an anti-Cisco coalition across infrastructure, security, communications and other network features.
The likeliest Communications Manager-ProCurve scenario, according to Michael Frendo, is one where an enterprise is deploying a new regional site and wants to use Communications Manager as the regional communications control point. Since the enterprise would likely be upgrading its data infrastructure anyway, to support VOIP/UC, it can come in with the ProCurve-Communications Manager combination.
The result is something that looks, from an infrastructure standpoint, like Cisco's Survivable Remote Site Telephony, but aimed at a larger scale implementation: at 400-500 users, about twice the size of SRST, Frendo said. As a result, "Certainly there's an overlap there, but it's not a complete overlap."
Frendo noted that this isn't an exclusive arrangement with HP and won't affect Avaya's relationship with Extreme Networks--"this is bringing the customers choice," he said.
"I think we've reached a point that, really custs should have a choice," he said. "They shouldn't think they have to buy everything from one company for it to work."
Frendo noted that HP is already a channel for Avaya, and he said he expects some HP and Avaya channel partners to pick up the other's gear in order to sell the new solution. This gives them all the "ability to pick up a richer solution that competes with someone down the street who sells Cisco," Frendo said.
I asked Michael Frendo whether this brings us closer to the point where voice will be a datacenter application, run from a centralized (mirrored) location, and he was skeptical, pointing out the concerns with time sensitivity (i.e., latency) when it comes to real-time communications.
"This is not like a website where, if it takes a couple seconds for something to come back, nobody's going to notice," he said.
The architecture for voice may be flattening somewhat, he said, but, "Is it open season, where you're going to ship a CD and it's going to run anywhere? We're [i.e., Avaya] not there yet, and I don't think anybody is."
