Obligatory ‘what I expect at VoiceCon’ post
Well, it appears that many other industry pundits and analysts are posting their VoiceCon previews and expectations, so I figure I better do it too. I mean, I certainly don’t want readers to feel disappointed by my lack of expectations prior to the conference in sunny Orlando…
I expect to see the keynote speakers wear Mickey Mouse ears, or at least the Goofy ears, during their presentations about industry trends, latest technologies, and company news. What better way to capture the attention of hundreds of over-caffeinated telecom geeks professionals, media hounds analysts, and vacationing exhibiting executives? And if you really want to impress the audience, work out a deal with Pixar (a Disney company) to show the new Toy Story 3 trailer in 3D. It’s okay that Woody and Buzz are more popular than you when in Orlando…
I expect Nortel employees to show up in t-shirts saying “I’m with Avaya,” and Avaya employees in shirts that say “I <3 Nortel”… This would be a great way to assure your customers that everything after the acquisition is a-okay. Who needs a product roadmap when you’ve got employees that publicly demonstrate their affection for each other? Team hugs between “exponentially better” employees also encouraged.
I expect nobody at the Aspect booth to openly use an Apple iPhone. It’s frowned upon at Microsoft, and therefore the same should apply to Aspect.
Lastly, I expect Cisco to forever change the Internet. Oh wait, did it already do that? Then how come my March Madness streaming games via CBS Sports is still so choppy over my 12 Mbps broadband connection?
In all seriousness, I am very excited to attend VoiceCon to learn what companies are doing to fulfill the latest customer demands. I am also looking forward to network and meet new people and actually shake hands instead of tweeting or exchanging emails….
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 the Nortel brand telecom’s plague?
It may very well be the end of an era for Nortel as nobody is interested in buying the name. The company was carved up into various businesses to be auctioned and sold off, but the brand failed to attract any buyers:
When Nortel Networks decided to auction itself off in pieces, its name was of the items on block. But now with its last business unit slated to go to Genband, Nortel hasn’t found anyone interested in taking up the moniker despite its long history in the industry.
Genband executive vice president and chief marketing officer Mehmet Balos said Genband had the option of buying the name when it placed its bid on Nortel’s switching and VoIP divison, but it declined. Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN), Avaya and Hitachi all left the Nortel logo on the table to as they carved off their respective pieces in Nortel’s CDMA, GSM, packet core, enterprise and optical businesses.
Incorporated as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing company in 1895, the company is one of the oldest in communications, becoming Northern Telecom in 197os and Nortel Networks in the 1980s.
How about auctioning it off on eBay and let common people bid on it? I’m sure some ex-employees or telecom professionals may be interested? I know I am. I’ll start the bid at $20.
Casualty of an acquisition: ‘Australian Bell Labs’ to be shut down
After a merger or acquisition it’s usually headcount reduction time. The axe cometh now that Avaya has absorbed Nortel. One of the first high-profile casualties — the Avaya Australian R&D staff:
Networking vendor Avaya appears set to shut down its research and development lab in North Ryde, Sydney – remembered affectionately as the Australian arm of Bell Labs.
Multiple sources told iTnews that the majority of R&D staff at the lab were informed that their positions would no longer be available.
After repeated attempts to contact Avaya, the company confirmed that it was “consolidating some of its R&D functions” in Australia as part of a “global realignment”, but refused to divulge how many researchers were laid off.
Hmmm, “global realignment”? My guess is that the realignment is likely to be lopsided with China getting a lot of attention.
