Avaya's plans for Nortel could force serious SIP proposals from carriers

Avaya came out with its product roadmap for the acquired Nortel base this week, and you could summarize it like this: We'll give you lots of space at the beginning of the year, provided you're playing ball with us by the end of the year.

Avaya is cutting off nobody in the Nortel PBX base -- at least, nobody whose Nortel product hadn't already begun down the end-of-sale, end-of-support trail. And it's declaring its own end-of-sale only on some supplementary products like the Nortel MCS 5100, a multimedia communications server providing audio and videoconferencing, collaboration tools and the like.

On the core question of what to do with Nortel's IP PBX flagship, the Communication Server 1000, Avaya's immediate plan is to follow on Nortel's post-bankruptcy Release 6 with more upgrades of its own over the next 12-18 months. But this looks like a time-delimited strategy.

Some experts think there will be two more CS 1000 full releases over the 12-18 month period. Others, such as Stephen Leaden, who gave an excellent webinar yesterday on the Avaya-Nortel roadmap for our friends at The Voice Report, thinks there will be only one. After this initial year or year and a half, Avaya has made it clear that CS 1000 users will have to begin "layering on" Avaya's own Aura platform to stay current.

Aura is Avaya's new unified communications architecture that incorporates a SIP Session Manager to handle supported applications, including SIP trunking carrier services. As we've discussed, those services can eliminate many traditional voice trunks in favor centralizing voice streams over a corporate MPLS network with an expedited-forwarding, or real-time, class of service, and then out to the public as necessary (or the reverse in the case of calls into contact centers, including those taken by remote agents logged onto the network).

But as you can imagine, the common challenge in all of the Nortel users' roadmap options is enterprise capital availability. Leaden explained that during 2010, Nortel users theoretically have three choices -- wait and consider, begin investigating an investment in Aura (which was designed for interoperability with other vendors even before Nortel's downfall), or begin due diligence on a move to another vendor (such as Cisco, Siemens, etc.). But by 2011 that's really squeezed down to the last two options due to the timeline Avaya laid out.

There's a lot more to the Avaya-Nortel roadmap, and I encourage you to check out the replay of the Voice Report webinar especially to learn about the other products in play. What I personally found fascinating were repeated references to exactly how Avaya will be presenting investments in the Aura platform to Nortel users. It's clear that Nortel users will be hit with ROI and payback analyses, and that Avaya will load in benefits that are dependent on other parts of an enterprise's telecom "ecosystem."

Leaden listed not only items such as centralized voicemail and unified messaging but also the trunk consolidation benefits from SIP trunking as likely inputs into Avaya ROI models. No doubt Avaya will use rosy ROI assumptions to push Aura on the Nortel users, including theoretical savings from the maximum amount of eliminated or consolidated telephony infrastructure.

Of course, it's ultimately up to AT&T, Verizon or others to propose such complete exchanges of traditional rate elements for dynamic VoIP call allocation in their own SIP trunking proposals. But think about the size of Nortel's base. Avaya's plan means that a huge number of telecom buyers will be getting proposals at a time of unusual urgency -- after their major equipment supplier has been bought out of bankruptcy -- in which the new vendor will be highlighting the maximum savings that a carrier should be offering them in service of the new equipment vendor's roadmap.

An insta-poll taken during the webinar showed that 48% of the attendees with Nortel gear (and there were at least 230 live users on the conference) are initially inclined to go the "due diligence, find another vendor" route. So I'm sure Avaya won't be shy about its ROI claims for Aura, including what it thinks the carriers can do!

Like the pressure-from-below that I recently highlighted in the smaller carriers' discovery of a potential gold mine in SIP trunking, this Avaya-Nortel transition will thus provide another pressure point on the big carriers to make solid VoIP/SIP trunking deals. At some point soon, a little roadmap discussion of your own with current and prospective carriers on this matter could prove quite rewarding.