Avaya Inc. on Tuesday unveiled its roadmap for integrating products and services from the recently acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES). Unified communications and SIP will be the focus going forward, executives said. It’s a strategy that includes embracing service providers as hosted providers of unified communications.
Deeper relationships with service providers is a key reason Avaya thought the Nortel deal made sense, executives said in a conference call on Tuesday. It wants to work with service providers interested in delivering unified communications to their customer bases, a market Avaya’s not had a lot of traction in so far.
Nortel brings many existing carrier relationships, which Avaya would like to leverage and expand from as they execute on their plan to move from pure VoIP and a PBX focus to full, SIP-enabled unified communications and voice-enabled business processes, for which they’re launching a new slate of Nortel-Avaya integrated products this spring.
“Service provider relationship development is measured in years, not quarters,” said Avaya’s Todd Abbott, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, and president of field operations. “Nortel increases our engagement there by a factor of years.”
He said that Avaya plans to continue to work with service providers that are using Nortel’s Business Communications Manager to deliver hosted service to the mid-market. Avaya’s own IP Office will be part of the equation as well. He added that the scope of that SME business will be around 10 to 25 percent of service provider engagement.
“The bulk however will be in the unified communications and collaboration space for enterprise customers,” he added, “and we will give them the opportunity to continue to sell and support what they have, while aligning with that. There’s more than enough time to make that happen and we will enable them to make that transition smoothly.”
And to that point, “Nortel and Avaya turn out to have very similar views that there must be a move away from just voice and the PBX towards more modular and real-time communications,” said Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of global communications solutions at Avaya. “That could be voice, video and real-time data, all enabled by a new SIP architecture. That’s a critical step to finally and truly start communications-enabling business processes and systems.”
Baratz added, “Our products that we bring to market, the investments we make, will be geared to develop synergies in the portfolios and there will also be an accelerated investment in wireless, that’s more and more important as time goes on.”
In other go-to-market news, Avaya plans to bring Nortel’s prodigious partner organization within “industry-standard” parameters, and Avaya is fundamentally changing the structure of how Nortel partners handle software support services. Avaya is also standardizing partner-customer engagement models on a global basis, will push more managed services through the partner channel, and will on-board all Nortel partners to its new “Avaya Connect” channel program, beginning in April.
For more information on Avaya’s plan for its channel partners, please see the related article at VON’s sister publication, available by clicking here.
