It must stink to be a customer, employee or potential purchaser of Nortel’s Enterprise assets. Today is not just another day. Although Avaya announced a victory of sorts on July 20 when Nortel accepted its “stalking horse” bid, the real deadline for bid submission has just passed (12 noon today). Word is that Siemens Enterprise Networks – the stalking horse company funded by buyout specialist Alec Gores’ Gores Group – has made a counter offer that Nortel must take seriously.

Update: There will be a public auction with an undisclosed number of bidders next Friday (9/11 for those who might be superstitious).

But seriously folks, it feels like a lot has happened out in the field since July 20. We get the sense that Avaya’s sales force has spent considerable time in front of Nortel’s existing customers and channel partners explaining how a transition to Avaya will work. Pre-announcing victory in the bid was a stroke of marketing and sales support genius. Meanwhile, industry strategists have known for some time that Gores had charted a course for Siemens growth in the enterprise market that is predicated on leveraging its OpenScape Software and related UC Integrations into the Nortel installed base.

For many years, Siemens’ OpenScape has been ahead Unified Communications (UC) pack with its support of almost every vendor’s UC clients. Yet its efforts languished because the enterprise division was known to be “on the block”. or “up for sale” – which is never good when you’re selling enterprise infrastructure with an expected service life measured in decades. When Gores Group entered the picture, analysts saw some time tested method in the madness. Gores would use his proven technique of assembling related communications enterprises into a going concern. Hey! This is “Corporate Recombinant Telephony”.

Glomming Nortel’s enterprise assets and installed base onto Siemens operations using OpenScape as the glue and HiPath as the path forward is the foundation of the Gores Group’s vision. The problems that cloud this vision are two-fold. First, the world economy is only beginning to come out of its deep freeze and enterprise spending on call processing and voice processing systems overall have taken a hit. Second, Avaya’s preemptive strike at Nortel’s existing customers is bound to have some impact on the purchase decision.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Voice Self Service, Recombinant Telephony, Avaya, Contact Center, Nortel