Avaya's Shiny ObjectAvaya's Shiny Object

It's not a tablet, but all in all, Avaya is lucky that the market thinks it's one.

I made it clear in my earlier blog that I think Avaya's "Flare experience" is very slick, and very good at showing off what Avaya does best: Integrate communications and manage sessions. What Flare does really well is hide that back end from the end user, behind a compelling, intuitive user interface.

But Michael Finneran captures accurately many of the hardware issues--why he believes the new device that Avaya calls a video endpoint falls short as a mobility-enabling "tablet." It's no wonder Avaya's Nancy Maluso told me that Avaya wanted to stay out of the "hardware wars."

It's funny--when I saw the title of Michael's blog, it kind of reflected how I felt about the new product, though with a more positive view in my case. Avaya's big win here is its cool user interface; the tablet form factor (and $2K price tag) less so.

But let's face it: If the story were, "Avaya announces new user interface for Unified Communications," would there have been a CNBC van parked outside that wavy Frank Gehry building in Chelsea where Avaya staged the announcement? What brought that van to that particular patch of curbside? One word: Tablet.

I don't know if Avaya deliberately took this tack, or not. What everybody wants to talk about nowadays is tablets. Avaya's giving them what they want. Now that they've baited the hook, they've got to explain where they're really going to take this--both their branded tablet ("video device") and their much cooler Flare software.