Avaya Announces Roadmap for Nortel ProductsAvaya Announces Roadmap for Nortel Products

Nortel's Meridian 1 successor, the CS 1000, will stay in the portfolio; the MCS 5100 UC offering will not.

Avaya Product Roadmap for Nortel Offers Has Few Surprises

Allan Sulkin, TEQ Consult Group

Avaya has unveiled the product roadmap for its Nortel ES acquisition and most of it is focused around its previously announced Aura architecture platform. Although many expected Avaya to go down a laundry list of products that will remain and those that will go, the current list of product cancellations is quite short: Nortel’s once promising MCS 5100 unified communications suite and the Nortel Multimedia Conferencing (NMC) offering. Avaya's Meeting Exchange will be marketed in lieu of these soon to be discontinued Nortel products and Avaya’s Presence Server will be used in place of the MCS 5100.

Today’s End of Sale announcement for the MCS 5100 and NMC does not mean sales orders will end immediately, but will continue for a minimum of nine more months. Avaya will then discontinue software development efforts, followed about two years later by end of product manufacturing to fulfill orders, but software and hardware services and support will continue for six years after final orders are taken. This is the stated life cycle policy for all products that will have End of Sale announcements at later dates. It's important to know that all current Nortel enterprise products will be for sale for the remainder of this year. No need to run out today for spare parts or crash kits.

The Nortel CS 1000 for enterprise customers and BCM models for small business customers will continue to be sold indefinitely, along with Avaya’s comparable solutions (Aura Communications Manager platform, Partner, and IP Office). Avaya stresses that all of these products can be networked via SIP trunk services. The CS 1000/BCM offerings will be supported by an enhanced Aura Architecture platform, which now includes the Nortel Agile Communications Environment (ACE) solution for applications and services integration, for shared IP applications and common user interfaces. ACE is a very powerful product that Avaya believes will greatly enhance its own product portfolio through integration with third party solutions.

The very large portfolio of Avaya and Nortel desktop telephone instruments remain intact for the time being, but Avaya plans to eventually prune the portfolios, retaining its own high end one-X 9600 models and the lower performance Nortel 1100/1200 SIP models for IP endpoints. SIP connectivity, not H.323 proprietary signaling, will be used for support of each family of the original manufacturer’s devices across systems. This means that the Avaya 1600 and Nortel 2000/3900 families will be phased out over time.

Note that Applications Sequencing, Avaya's plan to disassociate call set up and call routing operations using Session Manager and enablement of Aura Communications Manager (ACM) features using a dedicated Feature Servers, require installation of SIP endpoints (something Avaya will be promoting more heavily in the next months). I believe that ACM will prevail as the core generic software (with some Nortel-based feature additions) of the Feature Server for all current Avaya and Nortel system users in several years. It is too costly to develop and support multiple software programs for too many years.

The immediate plans for the CS 1000 include support by Aura Session Manager for SIP trunk networking, Applications Sequencing, and shared applications across multiple systems. The next CS 1000 software release (R7) is on track for later this year with additional upgrades and extensions planned at later dates. Meridian 1 customers will be urged to upgrade to the CS 1000 platform, but an alternative option is to use a SIP gateway for Aura support at the system level.

I personally believe that the CS 1000 has many years of useful life remaining as a new product offering before it fully merges with the Avaya enterprise solution. There are too many Nortel customer shops that have standardized on the Meridian 1/CS 1000 installations to discontinue the product any time soon. Likewise, the CS 2100 will not be discontinued soon, because it is the migration vehicle for the SL-100, a very large system model with a substantial installed base in the Federal Government market sector. Avaya plans to enhance the CS 2100 with SIP and unified communications capabilities over the next few years. Nortel’s AS 5300, a software-centric SIP communications offering targeted at Federal Government accounts, will also continue to be sold with enhancements through the Avaya Aura architecture.

The BCM platform is on track to eventually migrate to the Avaya IP Office 500 hardware platform by upgrading the Avaya-based product to support BCM station user and management system interface capabilities in a manner similar to the Partner/IP Office migration strategy now in effect. Like the Meridian 1/CS 1000, there is a very large installed base of BCM customers and it is the current migration vehicle for Nortel’s popular Norstar small business system. There was a lot of speculation that either the BCM or IP Office would be shortly discontinued, but this is not the case.

The Avaya Modular Messaging and Nortel Call Pilot messaging solutions will continue to co-exist for the immediate future, but are scheduled migrate to a new next generation unified messaging solution several years from now. Nortel Meridian 1 customers will be encouraged to upgrade to Call Pilot, as Octel customers are urged by Avaya to migrate to Modular Messaging. The HMS for Hospitality solution is common to the Avaya and Nortel portfolios and will continue to be upgraded and enhanced in its current platform design.

Nortel’s data communications portfolio is currently remaining intact, though rumors continue to circulate that the operation may be sold to a third party. Avaya must decide if it intends to re-enter and compete in a market that it failed in several years ago, going head to head against Cisco, HP, and a multitude of smaller competitors. Avaya has strategic relationships with several of their new competitors in this market.

The Avaya product roadmap strategy is summarized by the company as the following:

* Protect customer investments by simplifying and lowering TCO with upgrades and on-going support

* Extend business value with new SIP- connected productivity applications and accelerate business processes with ACE

* Grow at your own pace into the Avaya Aura enterprise-wide architecture and enhanced collaboration and customer service solutions