Avaya's Todd Abbott: "We're Ready to Go"Avaya's Todd Abbott: "We're Ready to Go"

"This is not going to take long to integrate," Abbott told me. "The planning has been fundamentally done."

I just finished a quick briefing with Todd Abbott, senior VP and president of field operations at Avaya, regarding the just-announced closing of Avaya's acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions. Abbott's key message: Avaya intends to use the acquisition integration process as a proof point for its positioning as execution-focused.The fact that the deal closed on schedule is "validation of the execution orientation that we've been focusing on at Avaya," and this on-time closing is the beginning of an integration process that Abbott promised will be efficient. "This is not going to take long to integrate," Abbott told me. "The planning has been fundamentally done."

For example, the next piece of critical news on the acquisition--Avaya's roadmap for the Nortel ES product set--is "98% done" already, according to Abbott. The roadmap will be announced January 19, and the main reason it'll take 30 days for the announcement is to give Avaya time to communicate the roadmap to the field, he added. He also promised that there are "not going to be any abrupt end of life decisions that are going to impact [customers'] product decisions."

The 6,000 Nortel employees who are moving over to Avaya got their offers a month ago, and the 25 top executives making the move to the new owners include:

* Phil Edholm, Nortel's former enterprise CTO and familiar face on the VoiceCon podium, who will report to Dr. Alan Baratz, Senior Vice President and President, Global Communication Solutions at Avaya.

* Wes Durow, who will be VP of Global Marketing at Avaya

* David Downing, who will serve as GM of the UC portfolio for Avaya.

* Joel Hackney, who headed up Nortel ES and will, as reported earlier this week, take over Avaya's Federal Government unit.

Abbott also predicted that there will be "very little channel conflicts or overlaps," saying that the number of overlapping channel partners between the two companies was lower than the 20% overlap that he said existed among customers. Acquiring Nortel's strongly channel-focused organization--including its key relationships with service providers--will definitely give Avaya a boost toward its goal of increasing its own proportion of indirect sales to 85% of total, Abbott added.

In addition to sheer numbers, Nortel also brings "a lot of channel expertise," Abbott said.

In other coverage of today's closing, Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy told Reuters that the acquisition will help Avaya build toward its exit from private equity ownership to a return to public ownership--a point that Allan Sulkin first made several months ago here."This is not going to take long to integrate," Abbott told me. "The planning has been fundamentally done."