Avaya Dials Up Skype As A PartnerAvaya Dials Up Skype As A Partner

The agreement is a multi-phase deal that has both a go-to-market element as well as a technology integration component, and will increase the value proposition for both companies.

Today Avaya and Skype announced a strategic partnership between the two companies to deliver real time communications to large and small companies. The agreement is a multi-phase deal that has both a go to market element as well as a technology integration component to it and will increase the value proposition for both companies.

The first phase of the partnership, which begins in October, will allow US based Avaya customers to access Skype Connect, Skype’s business solution. Customers that have deployed Aura Session Manager, Aura SIP Enablement Server, CS 1K, IP office or BCM can place calls through Skype Connect. Depending on calling patterns, this could have a huge cost savings impact for customers that choose to use Skype Connect for all of their international calling. Additionally Skype users can call Avaya customers for little no cost. Lastly, the first phase of the agreement will allow the Skype session to be treated with many of Avaya’s capabilities to do things like click to call from web sites or route Skype calls to an enterprise extension.

The second phase of the partnership, slated for the back half of 2011, will bring integrated Skype-Avaya UC solutions to US based customers. The integration will deliver federation between the two companies so users of either Avaya or Skype can collaborate with each other using chat, voice or video. Anyone that knows me, knows the lack of federation in this industry has been one of the issues that I feel has held the UC industry back from thriving the way it could, so it's good to see Avaya and Skype head down this path with one another.

Overall I see this as a great step forward for our industry as it’s the fist example of not only federation but also joint integration, which, as I said, has been sorely lacking. This deal isn't exclusive between the two so I would certainly expect to see other similar announcements between Skype and other mainstream UC vendors.

Over the past few years, much of the mainstream UC focus has been on the battle between Cisco and Microsoft, and Avaya has flown under the radar as they’ve put their strategy together. Of the "big three" (Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya) I have found Avaya to be the most aggressive vendor with regards to partnering and third party integration. Obviously much of this is due to the fact that they don’t have a portfolio as big as Cisco’s or Microsoft’s and to be competitive they really can’t go it alone. However, it's easy to say you're partner friendly but it's tougher to do it, and this announcement is further evidence of Avaya’s mindset.

Looking back to the last couple of announcements from Avaya, there have been partnerships announced that were overshadowed by other news. For example, the announcement earlier this month focused on the "Flare" tablet, but Avaya did announce an OEM agreement with LifeSize and prior to that Avaya announced that Acme Packet's SBC would be integrated into Aura, so aggressive partnering has appeared to become the norm at Avaya rather than the exception.

There’s another hidden benefit here to Avaya that at the time of writing had not been discussed by Avaya and that's the impact this partnership could have on its developer community, DevConnect. If you've read what I've written in the past you’ll know that my belief is that the long term winners in this space will be determined by the vendor’s ability to leverage a software community to develop "UC enabled applications". To date, Avaya has easily been the most aggressive UC vendor with respect to building a developer community. I know all you Microsoft people that lambasted me on my last blog will point to Microsoft's efforts around SharePoint, and that’s fair but I still contend that its efforts around building developer support around Lync (OCS) have been weaker than I would have expected at this point in time.

Cisco has talked a big game with respect to its plans for Cisco Developer Network (CDN) but the execution hasn’t been there. Looking at Cisco’s track record, they obviously do a lot of things well but building a developer ecosystem isn’t one of them. They've beefed up the CDN team so this might change but they've got a long way to go.

As far as DevConnect goes, I would give Avaya an A+ for effort but only a C+ on execution so far. Eric Rossman and company have done a fantastic job of building the program but there have been some issues that have held DevConnect back. The first and most important thing is market demand. The overall demand for UC enabled applications is relatively low. The concept is still vague to most buyers and we need a bigger effort from the entire industry to "prime the pump". The second issue is that has held DevConnect back is that the older Avaya platforms weren’t really ideal for developers, but the current platforms, Aura and ACE (from the Nortel acquisition) have strong developer relevancy so this shouldn't be an issue moving forward.

The third obstacle--and this is where the Skype partnership can help--is having true ISVs become part of DevConnect. In the early days of DevConnect, the community was comprised of telephony oriented partners--fax board manufacturers, call center CTI vendors and the like. Avaya gained a good number of software partners through its acquisition of Ubiquity, so that has certainly helped. Skype is now a top level DevConnect partner with thousands of its own partners. If Avaya can find a way to appeal to the Skype community, doubling the size of the Avaya community wouldn't be out of the question, putting Avaya into a great long term position.

In summary, I think this was a great announcement for Skype, Avaya and our industry in general. I'd like to see more of these but this is a good start.