Let's talk about what actually happened.
Avaya didn't just restructure. They cut thousands of experienced people — account managers, engineers, support staff — people who had spent years building real relationships with real customers. Not contractors. Not redundant roles. The people customers actually called when something broke or a deal needed to get done.
And those customers noticed. We watched it happen in real time. The calls shifted overnight. Not "what's the roadmap for Infinity" — it was "who do I even talk to now" and "should we start looking at alternatives."
Now there's a LinkedIn post about hiring to sell Infinity. Like the last few years didn't happen.
Here's the thing about trust in enterprise tech — it's not a product feature. You can't relaunch it. It lives in the people who showed up consistently for years, who knew the customer's environment, who picked up the phone. A lot of those people are gone. And the customers they served remember exactly why they left.
BlackBerry had better hardware by the time people stopped buying it. Didn't matter. The relationship was already broken.
We're not saying Avaya can't survive. But surviving and winning back the people you walked away from are two very different things. One is possible. The other takes a lot more than a job posting.