We've had an ongoing dialogue here on No Jitter about the Avaya (formerly Nortel) CS1000, the workhorse legacy telephony platform. Avaya recently made an announcement about future directions for the platform, basically telling users that there would be no new feature releases of the platform, though Avaya would continue to issue patches and service packs for the software. More significantly, Avaya has not declared the CS1000 End of Sale--an End-of-Sale announcement starts a six-year clock ticking on the end of support for an Avaya product, so the lack of such an announcement for the CS1000 means Avaya will be supporting the CS1000 for more than six years from now.
In a recent post, Gary Audin described an initiative by Genband to target and peel away CS1000 customers, and Allan Mendelsohn of Avaya, in Comments, offers a response, explaining the above points about support, and outlining Avaya's summary of the current options for CS1000 customers, which are basically to sit tight with the CS1000; plan a gradual migration to Aura; or accelerate your Aura migration. I followed up with Allan, hoping to put this conversation in the larger context that almost all large enterprises are confronting, regardless of whether the large legacy platform from which they're migrating is Avaya/Nortel, Siemens/Unify, NEC, or any of the other big vendors of the TDM PBX era. The list of enterprises that find themselves in this position is, I suspect, still pretty long.
That first option Allan mentions--sticking with the CS1000--might seem retrograde in a time of WebRTC, the all-mobile enterprise, and other buzzwords. Yet technology decision-makers in large enterprises have to think about an asset like a CS1000 or similar platform not in terms of technology buzz, but in terms of investment and risk, Mendelsohn said.
"Customers don't really want to make the move [off the CS1000] unless, when they look at the TCO of moving forward, they see the value of the applications they want to use, that the new platforms afford them," he said. And when he talks about "seeing the value," he doesn't mean appreciating the appeal of new platforms and applications--he means proving their return on investment. Otherwise, why not sweat the asset?
One phenomenon that Allan acknowledged, which I think many enterprise communications decision-makers would recognize immediately, is the difficulty of getting rid of any major feature or function that runs on that big platform. For all the hype about all the new technologies, it's just very difficult to rip out a feature that significant numbers of users still incorporate into their business processes. The classic example that Allan raised was voice mail.
"It's still as important as dial tone today," Allan said. "You still can't do a migration and say we're going to go forward without voice mail."
Another example is the desk phone. How much of a factor is the phone? Are platforms like the CS1000 in danger of being obsoleted from the outside in, by users' choice to forsake the deskphone? Once again, Mendelsohn hasn't seen this happening. "Ultimately we're finding that people just are not prepared to do that," he said. "End users still want the ergonomics, the form factor, the always-on capabilities of a desk phone to support their work."
So is everything just fine with the big platforms of the previous era--run them 'till they drop? Of course not. Mendelsohn acknowledged that you can't just count on running a platform indefinitely. "One of the drivers for why would somebody do a migration is ultimately about technology risk," he said. "You've got hardware that is sitting there that is aging, and power supplies, and how long can they go?"
And of course, it's not just the hardware that's aging: Those who specialize in running the core telephony platform within their enterprises aren't getting any younger, and the new hires have little incentive to learn how to run a platform that may literally be older than they are. So there's a potential skills gap.
But if you do make the decision to migrate from your core platform, Allan Mendelsohn points out, you're likely going to do just that--migrate. Rolling out a new platform across a large enterprise is, by nature, not a flash cut. He pointed out that the Aura migration path makes provisions for preserving the legacy features while introducing new ones.
Nobody really likes to talk about these legacy platforms. They're not sexy, they support features and functions that many younger workers care less about than do their older colleagues--voice mail and deskphones being two big examples. There's also, let's face it, nothing inherently interesting about such well-established and understood features, functions, and devices; and nobody's really working on anything that would suddenly make them more interesting again.
It also depends on what your enterprise uses communications for. Some enterprises may truly need only rock-solid telephony, with a dash of mobility or something Web- or video-based for a niche group. But most enterprises do anticipate a future where communications does look very different.
Avaya's making it clear that you can keep your CS1000, with full support, into the next decade. But will that really be what you want?
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