Avaya stares down Microsoft, Cisco

Avaya stares down Microsoft, Cisco
But after the purchase Nortel's business continued to suffer and purchases in general dropped because of the recession, he says. Vendors attempts to lure more sales by dropping prices further eroded revenues, he says. Overall, IP telephony sales dropped 20% to 30%, but Nortel's dropped 50% he says. Meanwhile, Cisco proved a tough competitor coming in with a strong first quarter this year and hanging close, Machowinski says.
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"These Nortel customers are up for grabs right now," Kerravala says. "If Avaya is able to upgrade them right now, likely they will own them for a very long time."

Kennedy says that his company represents stability to Nortel customers who were traumatized by the Nortel bankruptcy, waiting for months to find out whether the products they had installed would be supported, let alone upgraded as technology moves forward. Avaya's purchase of the assets gave them a financially stable company to deal with that promised product support and a migration path to new features and products that doesn't require ripping out old gear and starting over, he says.

"If my worst fear was that everything was going to go away and that I'm going to have a problem, that was instantaneously alleviated," Kennedy says. "We actually engendered a fair amount of good feeling from those decisions that we made of support and investment."

While that upgrade starts with voice, the real goal is upgrading them over time to UC, which blends all forms of real-time communications such as voice, video, SMS, instant messaging and the like.

These features are being melded into Avaya contact center features, enhancing what call agents can do and booting their productivity, but without being pushed as UC. For example, Avaya's platform enables individual agents to handle a voice call plus five other communications links at the same time either to multi task among many customers or to draw more parties into a particular customer session in order to resolve requests.

This type of innovation is being led by Avaya Labs, an 800-person division of the company that acts "like a start-up that wants to be acquired by Avaya," says Brett Shockley, the vice president who heads up the labs. He wants to aggressively grab the most interesting software technology the labs is working on and herd it as quickly as possible into new products if it shows potential -- what he calls crossing the chasm from applications to products. "We've got to figure this innovation thing out. We try to innovate so the new stuff is transformational," he says.

The model he uses includes a customer proof-of-concept stage where select customers receive software early on and try it out, an acid test to determine "whether it's relevant or if it's just geeks playing with technology," Shockely says. This gets these potential product ideas in customer hands a year or two earlier than previously, quickly weeding out the duds and accelerating the development of the winners that will go on to become actual products. Those ideas that have potential are brought to market-quality interface and deployed in customer networks soon thereafter before being officially launched and supported by the Avaya sales force.