The morning of day 2 at VoiceCon 2009 kicked off for me as part of the panel in the deep dive session called "I'm a Nortel Customer: What do I do now?" and I thought I would share many of the recommendations from myself and the other panelists as well the feedback from the audience.Just to set some context, the room was packed and a show of hands revealed that almost all of the individuals were Nortel customers so this wound up being a very lively session. The format was a short presentation from Allan Sulkin, myself, Stephen Leaden and David Stein with some follow up reaction from Phil Edholm from Nortel and Brad Tompkins, president of Nortel's user group, INNUA.
Based on my own presentation and then listening to the other panel members as well as feedback from panel "reactors" and Q&A here's a summary of the session and some feedback on what Nortel customers should be doing now.
The acquisition by Avaya is estimated by Avaya to close in December. I'm somewhat skeptical of this and think because of regulatory approval this date could slide, but if it does, it won't be a significant slide, meaning many of the open ended questions will be answered within a quarter or two of now. Within 60 days of close and it could be sooner, Nortel customers should expect the following from Avaya:
* Clarification on product roadmap on what stays and what goes. There were a few products, such as the ACE software suite and CS2100 that the whole panel thought were obvious "keepers," but the user community will feel discomfort until a definitive roadmap is released from Avaya, so it's critical that clarification is given on this as soon after closing as possible. The importance of this roadmap can't be overstated, so Avaya should have a goal to have this done within a month of closing.
* Customers should expect support and maintenance to continue for the most of the products for a period of time, likely 3-5 years, with the caveat that the customer is running the most recent version of the product. Here's an area where customers may need to upgrade sooner than they were expecting to, but it's never bad to be running the most current versions of products.
* Expect Avaya to provide a migration plan to get from where they are now over to the Avaya product set. It's likely that the multivendor capabilities of the Aura architecture will be used to provide a seamless migration plan for the customers.
Based on this, here are the main thoughts of what Nortel customers should be doing right now to prepare and take advantage of what's ahead:
* Understand the level of risk facing your organization right now. The level of risk will be determined by a combination of where you are in the lifecycle of your current system, the capacity remaining on that system and the age of the system.
* Unless your level of risk indicates that replacing the system is imminent, there's really no reason to panic, and just staying with what you have is the best thing to do until the sale is complete and Avaya has given product roadmap clarity. However, one of the recommendations that came across from everyone on the panel as well as from the panel reactors was to ensure that the systems are upgraded to the most recent versions, as this is likely to be important in any migration plan.
* If your risk level is high though, and you're in desperate need of an upgrade then only upgrade what you need to remove the risk from the situation you're in now. Any current Nortel product you choose now is likely to be supported by Avaya for a number of years but minimize upgrades to what you need right now.
Avaya is going to provide you with an Aura based upgrade path, but do not just accept this as the only alternative that you have. Over the next few months every Nortel customer is going to be presented with similar migration plans to Cisco, Siemens, NEC and other leading manufacturer's solutions. The customer base that you're part of was really the crown jewel of the acquisition and the rest of the competition will be vying for it as well, so use this to your advantage. Many of the competitive offers will be extremely price competitive and include services that will help with minimize the risk associated with the migration. Even if you know that you want to stay with Avaya, get competitive bids to ensure you're getting the best deal possible.
Based on many of the questions the panel received, there does seem to be a great deal of angst from the Nortel customer base and I fully understand why. However, while this seems like it may be a tenuous time to be a Nortel customer; the opposite is true; it's actually a great time. Don't panic and stay the course for the next few months with what you're doing now and let the offers come to you. Whether you decide on staying with Avaya or not, do not show your hand too early and get the vendor to give you an aggressive price with migration services, training costs, etc built into the offer. From a buyer's perspective, these situations don't come around very often, so take full advantage of it while you can.
