Tuesday, January 19th, Avaya’s leadership unveiled its vision for the integration of the Nortel products and services. As expected, SIP is the lynchpin of the program with a very strong focus on extending ‘real-time’ unified communications capabilities across the combined portfolio. Its services strategy is more attuned to the realities of 2010 and its channel-centric partner strategy it what holds it all together.
As stated by Alan Baratz, Avaya’s senior vice president and president of global communications solutions, “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.” He went on to clarify, “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.”
This Spring, Avaya will launch a range of integrated products that will be developed to further enhance the synergies within the portfolios and will make investments in the wireless portfolio. Of note, is the statement by Todd Abbott, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, and president of field operations, “Being partner-centric is a company strategy, not just a sales strategy,” said Abbott, “This extends down to how we design our products.”
Avaya will start to integrate Nortel’s extensive channel partner organization and will fundamentally change how Nortel partners provide software support services, adopting a more ‘industry standard’ approach. This will include the creation and implementation of a globally standardized partner-customer engagement model. Baratz stated that the Nortel software support model was fixed-fee based regardless of complexity of the issue being dealt with and as a result, Nortel lost money on every customer support contract which had a significant impact on their overall lack of profitability.
Over the course of 2010, this support model will be replaced with more comprehensive approach that will ensure that customer service levels are maintained but also covers the costs of providing these services. Nortel’s customer contracts will be reduced to cover 3 month terms in lieu of 12 so as to facilitate the transition to the new approach. Going forward, all new business including renewals will be sold this way. Moreover, the customer’s business partner will be able to bundle or resell these services.
To be seen is how these changes will impact the Canadian Business Partner community which has been loyal to Avaya over the years.
Managed Services
Avaya has gone back and forth on managed services, but will now start to push more managed services through the partner channel. Avaya is increasing their commitment to the channel partner community, “We’ll give them tools, back-up support and services, and Nortel just adds more to that.” Said Abbott. Avaya started to make investments in higher-end services 18 months ago so that channel partners would be able to add to their overall service offerings either as part of a bundled approach or in a resale model.
Avaya has committed to providing a globally consistent model across the integrated portfolio. “We had different go-to-market plans, different regional competencies, and no follow the sun model,” Abbott explained. “We’re consolidating all of that around Avaya’s professional services, global services and operations services for a consistent interface. Avaya will be a predictable organization.”
New Global Channel Partner Program " Avaya Connect "
Moreover, for all existing channel partners, Avaya will begin implementing its new global channel partner program “Avaya Connect” in February. Nortel partners will start to be integrated beginning in April. Avaya Connect is a drastically simplified program, which simplifies the current program of over 100 individual product certifications into 30 solutions certifications within four different tiers. This will make it significantly easier and simpler for partners to focus their efforts and resources on obtaining the specific areas of expertise they need to be successful.
Product Integrations
As Avaya focuses its products on the delivery of fully featured, SIP enabled unified communications, the Nortel and Avaya portfolios will be evolved over time. Some will continue on as-is, others will be phased out, and some Nortel components will be fully embedded into the host Avaya platform.
Avaya Aura™
Avaya Aura is the cornerstone for all of this. Aura uses SIP to connect IP infrastructures, whether they be communications or applications centric. Aura will be positioned as an overlay to legacy infrastructure and enables the delivery of highly evolved, advanced applications to the older systems while retaining as much of the older technology as possible.
Avaya Aura will be enhanced with the addition of Nortel’s Agile Communications Environment (ACE). ACE is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based and enables Web Services, which facilitates the rapid development of communications-enabled applications.
Contact Centers
SIP will also become the defacto integration standard for contact center applications providing a wide range of conference-based, collaborative communications. The contact center portfolio will also leverage SOA ( via Agile ) in order to simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. This new solution will be based on a model that will connect customers, agents and information across a wide range of communications technologies.
This fully integrated product evolution, will provide capabilities for agent desktop, work assignment, experience management and analytics that will scale from mid-range to large contact centers.
Small and Medium Business Solutions – of significant import to the Canadian Market
IP Office becomes the SMB platform. Nortel’s BCM, Norstar and Avaya’s PARTNER and Integral 5 all will remain available for now, but the plan is to converge the platforms into a fully-featured hybrid IP offering. IP Office will evolve to include all Nortel features, interfaces and phones to provide the industry's richest solution with strong investment protection benefits. The Nortel Software Communications System (SCS) will be re-badged Avaya and will provide a SIP-based solution for small and medium enterprise customers who want centralized unified communications management.
Data Portfolio
Avaya will maintain, in its entirety, Nortel’s roadmap for the data products. This is one area where many industry pundits are questioning Avaya’s strategy.
De-standardization Forthcoming
The Nortel CS 1000 platform will remain in the market for a little while longer, with a “couple more releases,” executives said, but will then evolve with Aura.
New Products to be announced in the Spring and Fall of 2010
Per Avaya’s usual product release schedule, some new products will be announced in the spring and along with another release in the fall. Avaya and Nortel have both evolved from Bell Labs and have taken aggressive advantage of that heritage of invention. “We share a common view of the technology, as well, making it easier to quickly integrate” said Baratz. It is expected that this foundation will make it easier to move forward in the creation of innovative voice centric solutions, much to the detriment of Cisco and other data-centric competitors.