This is a banner day for Avaya. Even though I reported the acquisition of Nortel’s Enterprise Systems division here back in July as if it were a done deal, it has taken these five months to finally close. It will take even longer for Avaya to assimilate the Nortel product lines and bring peace of mind to a new set of channel partners and customers. It is addressing many of the first order concerns of customers, partners and suppliers through this Web site.

Avaya’s overall message to the marketplace is that it is simplifying enterprise telephony and communications. Indeed, it has cleaned up its catalog of business communications solutions and it has created a new architecture, Aura, that is more conducive to embedding key components of voice processing, call processing, database management, analytics and reporting neatly into either the IP-based cloud. The approach is deceptively simple, meaning that there are a lot of moving parts. Absorbing Nortel and phasing out the Nortel brand adds one more level of complexity to the solution delivery process.

Now that Nortel and Skype share a major investor, Silver Lake, Olga Kharif in BusinessWeek reports here that executives from the two companies are “in talks” to determine how the two companies can better work together. Both Nortel and Avaya were heavily vested in IP-based “unified communications” strategies, putting emphasis on client-side management of presence, instant messaging and collaboration. Both had formal relationships with both Microsoft, to support Office Communicator and IBM for its UC Squared line up.

Having a SIP-based network to support inexpensive Internet-based voice calls independent of IT vendors might play well as a “simple solution” during the Nortel-to-Avaya transitional period (which will last years). We’ll certainly be watching the development of Avaya’s product roadmap to see where there is room for Skype.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Skype, Recombinant Communications, Avaya