Posts Tagged ‘aspect’

VoiceCon: Verizon Business advances partnerships with Microsoft and Cisco

Verizon Business is aiming to be the one-stop shop for all your communications needs by partnering up with technology leaders like Microsoft and Cisco, and services outfits like Accenture. Today at VoiceCon Orlando it announces closer relationships with Microsoft and Cisco.

Verizon IP Trunking is now certified by Microsoft to work with its Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The technical benefits and cost savings associated with SIP trunking need no further emphasis. According to my briefing with Tom Dalrymple, Product Management Director of Global Voice Solutions at Verizon, what customers will get out of this the most is that Microsoft will offer tech support to Verizon customers who implemented its IP trunking with OCS. And as the press release points out, Aspect is mentioned as an early adopter — not surprising considering Microsoft has some equity interest in the company.

In the area of video conferencing the company partners with Cisco to offer Verizon Immersive Video Conferencing Service for Cisco TelePresence — quite a mouthful when placing the order. This is definitely the high-end spectrum of video conferencing — Cisco equipment and over Verizon’s dedicated network — and should serve large corporations well. If you are a jetless CEO in NYC who needs to speak to somebody in Syndney, Australia, then this could work out for you as long as you remember to shave and tidy up (remember, high-definition video). In my pre-VoiceCon briefing with Roberta Mackintosh, Product Management Director of Global Unified Communications and Collaboration, I’d made a note that Verizon specifically built the network so that it would scale both ways (up and down) in anticipation of future interoperability between telepresence products, which is something that Cisco supposedly is advocating. This trend is definitely something to watch out for as BT has also invested in such a “unified” video conferencing network.

Aspect vs. Avaya, round two

Round one was a battle of the blogs, so naturally round two took place on — where else? — Twitter (conversation between Mike Sheridan, EVP of sales at Aspect, and Jon Alperin, director of developer relations at Avaya):

First of all, there was a SIP party? I guess I wasn’t invited. Would’ve been interesting to see some VoIP packets gone wild…

Is this a fair fight? Of course! All’s fair in love and war and telecom. But here’s an example of how standardization diminishes vendors’ distinction: If everybody offers SIP solutions then what’s so different between them?

To the customer, probably not much. All the customer cares is 1) It works; 2) It’s affordable; and 3) It’s supported long term. It may very well boil down to cost and platform ecosystem (e.g. extending and expanding the solution), but even those two factors are highly competitive among vendors. Yes, it is definitely a buyer’s market.

I do see a trend in 2010 which Avaya will have to constantly play defense against competitors like Aspect, at least until positive words from the field rise through the public channels regarding the execution of the Nortel roadmap. Aspect and other Avaya competitors are doing the smart thing by being aggressive during this time of uncertainty from Avaya/Nortel customers. It’s the nature of the business. Their success in wooing these customers remains to be seen, but we know they are already working hard on it.

Cisco is still on the sidelines being a quiet spectator. The company that dragged every TDM vendor into the SIP market is sitting pretty, probably laughing to itself. Oh wait, it did announce a massive new router capable of boosting the Internet backbones, like being able to let the entire population in China make a video call simultaneously. (Booooooring, right? Unless the Middle Kingdom becomes one ginormous contact center then I would care…)

Aspect vs. Avaya, round one

The gloves are starting to come off between these major contact center and telecom vendors.

As Avaya digests its Nortel platter, Aspect, a primary competitor, takes no time to stir up the FUD sentiment relating to the merger. Aspect’s Mike Ely, Director of System Architecture, jabs at Avaya’s SIP and UC roadmaps:

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The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.

Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform?  In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides.  They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.

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To which Jon Alperin of Avaya politely responds:

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Over 8 years ago, Avaya formalized the DevConnect Program to provide third parties with the technical support, resources and compliance testing programs necessary to deliver innovative joint solutions with a recognized level of interoperability. This extends to providing our customers, channels and support teams with the documentation and configuration information necessary to allow successful implementations.

To paraphrase a comment made at the 2009 VoiceCon show in Orlando, if you know who your members are and what they are doing, you really don’t have a developer program. Well, DevConnect has certainly grown to become a true developer program, with over 10,000 companies developing more solutions than we can even imagine. In fact, DevConnect is recognized by leading analysts including Gartner, Canalys and The Yankee Group as an important strength in Avaya’s market leadership position. With the addition of Nortel’s portfolio, DevConnect supports over 170 different open interfaces across more than 40 products or platforms.

We don’t think of SIP as simply a protocol. To Avaya, SIP is the underpinning of an entire architectural model, inclusive of endpoint devices, network interconnections with Service Providers, and for providing new flexibility in connecting the right applications to the right people.

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We recognize that our customers rely heavily on contact center and Unified Communications applications to run their business, and that there is a cost to migrating fully functioning and useful applications from older, well established APIs such as TSAPI/JTAPI to any other protocol. So we don’t force them to do this. Instead we enable them to gain the advantages of SIP, including access to rich presence-based information, by allowing them to gently introduce SIP into their network architectures where and when it makes financial sense to do so for their unique situations.

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There’s no winner to declare here. Both have made valid arguments and good points. However, the volley of blog posts between Aspect and Avaya gives us a glimpse of how traditional telecom vendors are dealing with the ever evolving communications landscape — in this case, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) — and the realities of the business world.

Aspect has always been focused on contact center technologies, from the ACD to CTI to workforce management to UC. It knows contact center software. It has always billed itself as a software company and has consistently placed in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant in recent years for worldwide contact center infrastructure. Being a software company it knows the importance of interoperability and platform and standards. That’s why it also has an intimate partnership with the world’s largest software company, Microsoft. In fact, the Redmond Giant has an unspecified equity stake in Aspect, ensuring that Microsoft will always have an entry point into the contact center business and not just enterprise communications (via its Office Communications Server offering). Transitioning to something like SIP is almost a natural course of progression for Aspect — just get the engineers to tweak some code and be done! Next standard, please!

Avaya, on the other hand, has a history of spin-offs and mergers. It was spun-off from Lucent’s business communications division. It was privatized by two well-known equity firms. It then won the bid for Nortel’s Enterprise Communications division. The company has always been about selling the box (hardware) as much as what’s inside it (software). It was also successful in dominating the contact center business with its PBXs and servers thanks to its developer-friendly DevConnect Program which allows third parties to create applications surrounding its communications platform. Moving from traditional TDM applications to SIP-based ones weren’t as simple for Avaya and its peers (e.g. Nortel). Most of the time it required additional boxes to enable the SIP solution, and thinking hard about what products are worth the additional resources to IP-enable them and how to satisfy existing customers who weren’t ready for IP.

The bottom line? Software-centric vendors like Aspect believes that it is the hare compared to the tortoise that is Avaya (and an even slower tortoise with Nortel on board). We all know how the old fable ended. But in today’s dynamic competitive business environment, the hares know better not to nap and the tortoises know to wear skates.

And I’m awaiting Cisco’s response…

Is Nortel a chink in Avaya’s armor?

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the Avaya-Nortel (Enterprise Solutions) acquisition and the recently released product roadmap. Major Avaya competitors have offered their cautionary view. From Aspect:

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Avaya has stated that it will be selectively choosing its best of breed capabilities based on the Avaya and Nortel product portfolio.  While we applaud this approach, we also question the impact it will have on its customers. With two product portfolios that are largely based on proprietary technology and competing product strategies, this means that in many cases there will not be an optimal migration path for customers that are not on the platform of choice for future development. This will require significant investments and forklift upgrades for the combined Avaya/Nortel customer base.

Based upon our company’s experience with large mergers and acquisitions, Aspect believes that Avaya has a monumental task in trying to maintain customer satisfaction while trying to build credibility in the unified communications (UC) market, integrating platforms, maintaining continuity in its contact center offerings, and making adjustments to its workforce under a newly-appointed management team; a challenge while having fewer people supporting a significantly expanded product portfolio.  Based upon our past experience and Avaya’s just-released roadmap, we have insight into some of the challenges they’ll face in the coming years:

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And also from Interactive Intelligence.

Their bottom line to Avaya-Nortel customers: brace yourselves because it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

The new Avaya is now the dominant force in contact center solutions, but it is also the most bloated at the moment. Announcing the product roadmap will ease some concerns from customers, but as we all know about eating a big meal — it’s about how to keep the food down. Avaya will need near perfect execution in absorbing the whole Nortel ES — products, services, headcount, and then some.

As others have opined, it won’t be easy. Nortel has fallen hard with a troubled past and poor management. Remember the Clarify deal in 1999? Looking to cash in on the dot-com craze Nortel offered $2 billion in stocks for CRM software maker Clarify, only to sell it two years later to Amdocs for $200 million in cash. Its executives was caught in a financial scandal involving $3 billion misstated revenue over 1998, 1999, and 2000. Tens and thousands of workers were let go in subsequent restructuring and reorganization efforts.

Nortel became a perfect case study for Harvard Business.

But Avaya has the backing of two reputable private equity firms, Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital. These firms privatized the company for $8.2 billion in October 2007 and are no strangers to high-profile technology companies. Among their other investments include Skype, Seagate Technology, Freescale Semiconductor, and Alltel Wireless.

Obviously they did not consider Nortel assets to be toxic. But right now as Avaya is going through growing pains, competitors are readying their sales force to capitalize on Avaya-Nortel customers’ FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) sentiments. Genesys and Cisco are the two companies which stand to lose significant IVR market share in light of a beefed up Avaya. I would not be surprised to see Genesys and Cisco — both known to have very aggressive sales programs in the industry — to start offering deep discounts and incentives to convert existing Avaya and Nortel customers during this time of transition.

For telecom and contact center customers, now is a great time to shop around.