Thread regarding Avaya layoffs

None of this should be a surprise to anyone. Alan M came in having pocketed a large chunk of change before setting foot in the door. Embarrassingly, quite a few employees jumped on the kiss his a-s bandwagon without recognising the obvious bull sh-t he was spewing. Why nobody thought about it amazes me. Here's a company with a poor record of paying AIP and sales dropping through the floor yet they bring on, arguably, one the biggest BS artists I've ever had the displeasure of working for. None of this is helped by having a pretty pi-s poor product as well. Perhaps Alan, ML and the rest of the lackeys should have asked those actually implementing the products what customers thought of it.

I’ve been around since the beginning, and this is all quite true.

Avaya came to be in 2000 when it was cast off by Lucent at the tail end of the dot com bubble, like a neglected child kicked to the curb by a parent with a crack addiction. And saddled with a chunk of the family debt to boot.

A few years later, there was an all too brief resurgence, where Avaya had managed to hold on to some semblance of excellence in engineering and execution while shedding the inherited burden and becoming debt-free.

But then then it fell into the clutches of Silverlake and TPG, with the toxicity of private equity setting the stage for all that would follow. That was the beginning of the end. The current second round of PE ownership, and all ongoing shenanigans, is surely the final chapter.

Avaya has made so many poorly informed the decisions it is surprising that they have survived as long as they have.

I in part blame the initial decision by Silverlake to buy Avaya. The leveraged buy-out diverted alot of sorely needed funds from areas such as R&D and Sales.

Then there is the disaster of buying Nortel. After the acquisition Avaya had the majority market share in several segments. But as a favour to Avaya's competitors, Avaya leadership came up with a strategy so misguided that drove away long time loyal Nortel customers.

By the mid-2010's, Avaya was declaring the UC space as "dead", when in reality Avaya had ceeded it to Microsoft.

Avaya leadership also mentioned the need to "move the cloud". Which meant doing effectively nothing, while again Avaya's Competitors ate their lunch.

By the time Jim Chirico cooked the books 2019 to 2022, Avaya's goose was already cooked.

Alan's sole goal was to rearrange the deck chairs to justify his payday.

I frankly don't even know how much value still exists with Avaya. The install base is shrinking and other companies have no interest to maintaining and supporting legacy products.