Avaya/Nortel : Difficult Decisions AheadAvaya/Nortel : Difficult Decisions Ahead

We really like some of the Nortel assets, and hope they will find a place at Avaya.

Now that the presumed winner of the Nortel Enterprise sweepstakes is known, the next step for Avaya is to develop and communicate a roadmap. Some of the Nortel assets we really like, and will hopefully find a place at Avaya, are:* Agile Communications Environment (ACE): Launched in June 2008, and discussed in this earlier blog, ACE creates web services interfaces for functional communications elements like presence, location, billing, etc. Designed by Nortel to be vendor-neutral, it already connects to Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM, Cisco and Tandberg. This morning (pre-announcement) Nortel's Tara Mahoney, who owns many of Nortel's communications applications including ACE and Contact Center tweeted, "Comparing Nortel Enterprise to Avaya Aura, Nortel ACE is a solid complement to Aura, extending capabilities into IT realm and cross domains."

* Contact Center 7.0: How a combined Avaya/Nortel will handle contact center will be quite interesting. Obviously Avaya is very strong here, but there are assets in the Nortel portfolio that could be put to good use. The fact that the current Avaya VP for the Contact Center Mid-Market products is the former VP for Contact Center products at Nortel (Gwynne Wade) should help smooth this process. Will this mean the death of Interaction Center (the former Quintus product)? It will certainly mean the death of Nortel's OEM agreement with Siemens for the SER Outbound Dialing application--Avaya has its own high end predictive dialing assets from its acquisition of Mosaix. Avaya's Contact Center Express, recently acquired from Agile Software, seems to be on solid ground. Nortel has not updated its SMB Symposium Express platform in many years.

* CS2100. This is an enterprise product that begins with the CS2000 central-office switch and then adds enterprise capabilities. It is the IP/SIP successor to the SL 100, has great scalability and a faithful installed base in major universities and government locations. To date it has been a North America-only product (the exception being foreign bases of the US government). How does it fit with Avaya's Aura architecture, and specifically Aura Session Manager?

It will also be interesting to see how the Microsoft relationship plays in all of this. Somehow, I don't see Microsoft re-committing to the combined Avaya/Nortel.We really like some of the Nortel assets, and hope they will find a place at Avaya.