A quick note on AVST acquiring Active Voice from NEC Unified Solutions. Marty Parker and Blair Pleasant have each already weighed in on the announcement, discussing its implications to AVST and NEC's respective businesses. When I started reading up on the announcement, my main thought was, "What happens to the UM8500?" This is the main unified messaging option for NEC's SV8500 and SV8300 IP PBXs, as well as the legacy NEAX systems. UM8500 is based on the same source code as Active Voice's Kinesis product and, according to a FAQ AVST issued on the acquisition, Kinesis is going the way of the dodo. I feared some big, ugly disruption, with AVST CallXpress somehow replacing Active Voice Kinesis as the basis of the UM8500.As it turns out this is not the case. AVST is in fact discontinuing Kinesis, but only as an independent unified messaging platform sold through Active Voice VARs and separate from NEC IP communications platforms. UM8500, despite its relationship to Kinesis technologically, will continue to be actively developed by the engineers that have been transferred from NEC to AVST. (Similarly, AVST's retention of the various Repartee products ensure that NEC's UM8000 and UM4730 continue, since the latter are based on the former.) In this way, there should be little disruption to NEC resellers and customers.
Or will there?
To be perfectly honest, (Chime in if you can think of one.) Certainly, there are some that have always relied on OEM partners for unified messaging. But those that already own messaging businesses tend to keep them in-house. This simplifies customer support (single source of support for communications and messaging products), reseller relations (single reseller program for VARs to get communications and messaging certifications from), product development (closer relationships between engineers in communications and messaging product groups), and integration (ability to make sure telephony, messaging, UC, contact center and other elements of the overall communications solutions work together in a seamless fashion).
In the end, it seems to me that NEC selling UM8500 and the other messaging software to AVST would be akin to Cisco selling Unity to Esnatech or Avaya handing over Modular Messaging to some DevConnect partner. Such a move would undoubtedly raise eyebrows among customers, resellers and the industry at large. I suppose it's not a perfect analogy, since for almost a decade Active Voice operated as a separate, wholly-owned NEC company--but you get my point. Developers of business communications systems have long owned their own voicemail, then unified messaging software, and with the rise of unified communications these have been often seen as a part of the overall UC solution, part of the company's overall move toward software-based business model. While I'm glad UM8500 and the other NEC messaging products will continue, NEC customers and resellers should monitor the situation closely and make sure that working with both AVST and NEC for the combined telephony-messaging solution is in no way disruptive.
