Avaya's big mistake

Avaya killed the Norstar / BCM line which still has a lions share of the marketplace only to force them into an Avaya product or lose the business to competition. Same goes for the Nortel CS1000 and CallPilot. There are a ton of Meridian Mail and CallPilot voicemail ports out there.

Avaya made the same huge mistake that Nortel did of not building on the Nortel data gear.

I still work in the business and customers love the Nortel products. Now sadly many global customers who have Nortel gear or Avaya Blue are moving to Cisco. Cisco isn't doing that great with their layoffs either.

Avaya should have kept the door open for 15 years on all Nortel products to keep the cash coming in.

Each time a patch is released by Avaya I wonder what else it will break. Nortel systems were primarily running on VxWorks on the large systems.

The truth is that hospitals are not going to put ip phones in rooms. There is a enormous amount of TDM customers out there that do not have the financial ability to forklift upgrade to IP or cloud based systems.

Once again a true reflection of mismanagement by listening to marketing rather than engineers and the customer base.

I hope @OjGujsb-bhou does not mind me putting this in a thread, so more people can see it. Really good point.

Comment! It's anonymous!

4 replies (most recent on top)

The decision to kill BCM in favour of IP Office was a bad one in terms of the abilities of the technology. IPO had (and still has) no viable path forward to move into the midmarket and was a dead end product at the time of the acquisition. The software is an unmaintainable mess. BCM was built with a modern OS and software architecture that would have facilitated any enhancements and expansions. And the phones... Nortel had decades of experience designing high quality phones that practically never failed. Avaya's hardware design teams always seemed to be designing a phone for the first time and were unaware of the fundamentals like providing side tone, or debouncing switches. They were uniformly awful.

Businesses are still buying phone systems. In fact, my employer is ripping out our Aura this fall to replace it with something ... but we haven't been told what the replacement is yet.

I guess you all have nothing better to do than bash Avaya. I work at Avaya and our customers and employees like both Blue and Red solutions. The way you talk we would still be in the 1A2 age and complaining about Analog to Digital . Give it a break and worry more about what's happening in the political arena in this country.

Avaya will pull out of Chapter 11 and be a stronger for years to come.

Here here..!

Avaya did study after study after study (usually with ex-Nortel people working on it) about how to monetize the Nortel base to no real avail. Saying the cash was "keep coming in" isnt accurate, majority of those systems just worked too well and the customer was not spending anything on those systems including maintenance. No one cares about voice anymore and you will continue to see old relic PBX systems and phones in your dentist office till they dont need them anymore.

To say that Nortel data wasnt built on is also inacurrate, you had the same Bay Networks hacks not build that portfolio for 3 companies, portfolio was never complete, couldnt win big bids and thinking you could convince people to adopt a new protocol (PBB, MACinMAC, SPBM) will a tiny marketshare was either an inflated ego or pure idiocy.

Thread regarding Avaya layoffs

Avaya's big mistake

4 replies (most recent on top)

Post a reply