Nortel Enterprise Solutions is going into the hands of its onetime arch-rival for voice premises equipment, Avaya.

That result was assured with Monday morning's announcement that an auction for the Nortel enterprise unit -- a key element of Nortel's bankruptcy proceeding -- had been completed. While not explicitly announced this way, it's widely believed that the Siemens enterprise unit bid up Avaya's original offer of $475 million over several rounds before letting Avaya have it for $900 million.

Avaya's clinching of the Nortel prize keeps intact many of the expected user impacts of the impending marriage of the one-time No. 1 and No. 2 U.S. PBX vendurs. Avaya gets feet on the street through Nortel's extensive distribution network, although much of that network is also now invested in the enterprise voice and convergence products of Cisco. Indeed, Cisco and Avaya are now set up as the Coke and Pepsi of the enterprise voice gear market, with the possibility of far more concentration than this market has ever seen in the past.

Acquirers often are ruthless wielders of power, deciding which of the acquired company's products, employees and projects to keep and which to get rid of. And let's be fair -- it's clear that Avaya would be justified in doing some rationalization. Possibilities include:

-- A convergence-products alliance that Nortel had with Microsoft has never really borne fruit, especially since Microsoft is pursuing enterprise voice in an explicitly Windows-based softphone environment, and that alliance may go.

-- Avaya may also see no value in the longstanding problem Nortel has had in making sense of its data switching product portfolio from the basically botched acquisition of Bay Networks in the 1990s.

-- Of perhaps more concern, support for some Nortel products (or some distributors) may change or drop, a concern being made explicit by Verizon as one of Nortel's legacy "RBOC"-type distributors.

Excellent discussions of these detailed matters are taking place with our friends at NoJitter.com; I particularly like a post by Allan Sulkin called Questions re the Future of Nortel ES.

But from a strategic standpoint, one thing that I think enterprise telecom managers should be asking themselves is what kind of role voice and unified communications equipment should play in managed services procurements going forward. Many corporate PBX footprints are very scattered and diverse based on long-lived legacy considerations in various business units, geographic divisions and even individual locations. But if Cisco and Avaya go head-to-head as the dominant players, we know that this can be played to strategic advantage going forward.

From a data perspective, obviously most companies are "Cisco shops." But from a VoIP/unified communications standpoint, holding out a large chunk of business for archrivals to bid on could be in the offing. Thus, the looming Cisco vs. Avaya war could be seen as a reduction of choice -- or, alternatively, a big opportunity for savvy enterprise users, especially when you consider that managed services procurements often offer the best transport pricing. Much remains to shake out, but we'll be watching this closely.

An increasing number of enterprises are now opting for truly comprehensive telecommunications procurement projects. A large part of the idea is to represent to suppliers that there are no stepchildren anymore among corporate networking services. Big companies want great deals on everything: corporate WAN services like MPLS, traditional toll and toll-free voice, LAN/WAN managed services, and expanding footprints of cell phones, smartphones and aircards. Today's diversity of user behavior probably makes all of these areas financially material to your company, and today's economy doesn't allow for bleeding, non-market costs in any of these areas.

The trick is to get suppliers to respond to the extra incentive of a big bucket of diverse business that you've put out simultaneously to the market, without sneakily creating linkage that actually subtracts from the flexibility of the ultimate deals.

Most people know that even in a full competitive refresh, it's advisable to use separate or modular RFPs for key parts of the project -- such as wireline, wireless, and complex managed services. But carriers know how to subtly pull these separate items back together in a way that may not be optimum for the deal you want in any of them.

They propose dollar commitments to count up all of the spend, or time commitments to put all of the services under the thumb of one carrier for the same relatively long period, or credits that are structured to be meaningful only using the total bucket of services. All these moves can render the entire package of services more onerous or restrictive than they would have been separately.

Consider corporate wireless contracts. Even outside a multi-service procurement project, wireless contracts typically cut across two dimensions. One is the length of wireless carrier's contract with the corporation -- say, two years. The other is the length of each subscriber's line term -- often a choice of one or two years.

It would be great for a corporate-liable user to have no "contract" on the logic that he or she is simply part of a large corporate contract, and there's nothing wrong with asking for that. But carriers generally argue that sunk device costs make it logical for them to have terms attached to individual lines with incentives for a longer term. You can and should negotiate for a pool of waivers of the resulting early termination fees up to some percentage of the total footprint, but both an overall contract term and individual line terms are still the norm.

This leads many telecom managers to try to keep things coterminous in anticipation of their next negotiation. After all, the company that puts out "on the street" a full competitive refresh across many services has often labored mightily to line up its existing wireline, managed services and wireless deals. But watch what happens: some bidders may propose a longer corporate term for all of the RFPs that make up a competitive refresh.

In the carrier's mind, the single resulting mega-commitment (if it's really a single commitment, which is another question) may simply be a sum of the anticipated commitments for each of the included services. And the commitment may have to be longer than such component parts as individual circuit terms or wireless subscriber line terms, potentially complicating future attempts at coterminality, especially if user behavior shifts to newer devices or technologies.

In the text of RFP responses, their logic is often expressed as a compliment to the customer: "It's great that you want to competitively bid out everything -- believe it or not, we think that's swell! So how about we put everything under a single converged three-year contract? We'll give you our best offer that way -- promise!"

But your goal should be that the combined commitment enables one type of service to retire the obligation to other services faster than any of them would on their own, especially if you can swing a term commitment rather than annual commitments. Just adding up the separate commitments into a new, single number, and putting everything into a single, longer-term deal doesn't accomplish that. Will the prices be better? They could be -- especially since we're seeing some of the best transport pricing in large managed services procurements -- but that's not a given just because of the fact of rolling wireline and wireless deals together. Prices still have to be compared to the market regardless.

I particularly love the word "converged" when it sneaks into carrier proposals in this context. If a carrier sells you both hundreds of managed routers for a new MPLS network and thousands of mobile phones under the same three-year term, what's "converged" about that? Nothing from a network standpoint, which is what the word "converged" should mean (e.g., sending landline voice over public or private IP). But it sounds good, doesn't it?

Bottom line: as with real convergence, it's the cost and quality details that count. A comprehensive multi-RFP procurement project may or may not result in a single contract. If it does, that contract should be at least as flexible as multiple contracts would have been.