Avaya’s Nortel Acquisition – Who’s the Winner?

By Cary Bush, Sales Director for Voice Services, Logista

As final resolution nears in Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel’s enterprise group, what is not resolved is who will be the biggest winner in the deal.

Avaya’s consistent message is that not only will Nortel customers be cared for without lapse in service/response, but the existing Nortel channel also will continue to see its needs met. Others are claiming this as their own victory, however. Among the Cisco ranks, it is being propagated that the complexity and overlapping products will breed confusion and loss. Other, more traditional challengers, are swarming around the Nortel installed base as well to capitalize on the fear, uncertainty and doubt. Shoretel, Mitel and other competitive companies see this as a perfect storm that will enable market expansion with so many customers sitting on legacy Nortel systems that are not IP-enabled for the available technology/applications.

More and more, these enterprise competitors seem to concede traditional proprietary territory in order to survive the next wave; whether through M&A, strategic partnership or cross-product interoperation. SIP seems to be the great equalizer since all the current systems boast adherence (as well as pressure from SIP-based open-source technologies), but that is ultimately a good thing for the industry.

For the last 20+ years the notion has been to position a solution “that has the most features” or flexibility, but since the most productive functionality has moved to the “cloud” (at least partially) and interoperation is rampant with SIP applications, the CPE positioning game has changed dramatically. Enterprise “prem-based” solutions have seen some of the business move to hosted solutions in the last couple of years as well. Those that survive this transition will need to begin to accommodate a “hybrid” solution; one that not only takes advantage of the “cloud” or SaaS options, but also yields lower TCO and ease of management (something that Avaya is probably banking on with strong investments in SIP integration technologies).

Only time will tell who will benefit most from the deal. Avaya has a strong migration story of its own with the Aura solution. It works equally well positioned with Nortel or any other installed base, which is an excellent position to be in as so many customers remain at this point of decision. The primary advantage of Avaya Aura is to bridge the gap between legacy voice infrastructure and the efficiencies of IP services for larger, multisite organizations, which ultimately yields lower TCO and a quick ROI. That solution is one of the better migration stories on the street right now. As the solution manufacturers trend toward the future, the traditional systems integrators will follow suit (albeit at a painfully slow pace).

The real winner in the end is the enterprise consumer. Even with so much change in the enterprise landscape over the last decade, there is still more efficiency to be realized. This simply translates to lower costs for the “buyers” as they evaluate the available options.

Cary Bush is sales director for voice services at Logista, an enterprise VAR focusing on UC technologies. He leads the company’s voice services business development efforts in the Southeastern United States. He also is a member of the 2009-10 PHONE+/Channel Partners Conference & Expo Advisory Board.