No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Sulkin-Parker Exchange on Avaya-Nortel and UC

Editor's note: The following is an email exchange between Allan Sulkin and Marty Parker, in response to Marty's most recent post.Sulkin:

Just read your UC piece, and I agree totally that the Nortel UC MCS 5100 solution is definitely stronger than what Avaya kluges together. I think that Avaya, however, may decide to keep its own platform in place if only due to internal organization politics. It would be difficult for Avaya to port its UC capabilities to Nortel product, because too much of the software is embedded in Aura Communications Manager code, but it could be done over time. Sometimes companies make the wrong decision, and Avaya has shown to be an expert at this. It took a long time to develop and market Modular Messaging to replace the Audix and Octel platforms, and it may take as long to integrate the Avaya and Nortel UC offerings. I am also wondering how Avaya plans to generate significant revenues from its UC platform, if many of the feature-specific station user license fees are given away free as part of its Enterprise edition for Aura CM or for only $50 per user with Standard edition. I don't think that UC, by itself, will be a major revenue generator for Avaya or others when the license fees are bundled with the generic software package. It appears that many UC capabilities will become standard at no additional cost to the customer. The application servers, third party equipment, won't generate much in way of profit. Blackberry would profit more from mobile applications. Is it possible that UC will become widely used, but not the profit-making machine some envisioned at the start? And what happens if Google Wave takes off?

Parker:

You are exactly right on the three issues you raise. The post is suggesting how New Avaya could act, and avoided commentary on past acquisitions. It is a new executive team, so want to give them the benefit of the doubt; however, the killer behavior exists in Avaya Labs, who can choose whether to play nice, getting the best of the two portfolios, or to play badly, making up all the reasons this can't be done.

Yes, you're right that Avaya will be tempted just to keep their own conferencing portfolio, Meeting Exchange (even the name shows little innovation), but the Nortel MCS/Diamondware/Web.alive suite, with Microsoft and IBM integrations, is much further along. If there are actually open, standards based products at Avaya, there is no reason not to do this. All of Avaya's Meeting Exchange products were acquired, so there is almost no dependency on Communication Manager or on the management suite.

ACE is another question. Again, it is better, but the Avaya engineers and their product managers will likely say that Avaya Application Enablement Server, which is now buried in Aura, already has all the needed integrations to Communications Manager. Of course, they will be missing the point; for UC, the important integration is to the rest of the technology stack, especially applications on desktops and mobile devices, and ACE is way ahead on that.

Lastly, as to whether UC can make a difference given Avaya's packaging and approach, well, that's the entire point. If they choose just to keep selling PBXs, their supposed 25% share will fall back to 10%, just like ATT/Lucent's 35% share dwindled when those parent companies thought they had better technology and customers would not embrace upstarts with IP Telephony architectures.

The new spending is on the UC elements. If Avaya chooses to bundle those with Communication Manager so as to pump up the "PBX" share, rather than focusing on share of the new spending, they will be sorely disappointed in 3-5 years' time. We'll see.

Yes, you're right that Avaya will be tempted just to keep their own conferencing portfolio, Meeting Exchange (even the name shows little innovation), but the Nortel MCS/Diamondware/Web.alive suite, with Microsoft and IBM integrations, is much further along. If there are actually open, standards based products at Avaya, there is no reason not to do this. All of Avaya's Meeting Exchange products were acquired, so there is almost no dependency on Communication Manager or on the management suite.

ACE is another question. Again, it is better, but the Avaya engineers and their product managers will likely say that Avaya Application Enablement Server, which is now buried in Aura, already has all the needed integrations to Communications Manager. Of course, they will be missing the point; for UC, the important integration is to the rest of the technology stack, especially applications on desktops and mobile devices, and ACE is way ahead on that.

Lastly, as to whether UC can make a difference given Avaya's packaging and approach, well, that's the entire point. If they choose just to keep selling PBXs, their supposed 25% share will fall back to 10%, just like ATT/Lucent's 35% share dwindled when those parent companies thought they had better technology and customers would not embrace upstarts with IP Telephony architectures.

The new spending is on the UC elements. If Avaya chooses to bundle those with Communication Manager so as to pump up the "PBX" share, rather than focusing on share of the new spending, they will be sorely disappointed in 3-5 years' time. We'll see.