Avaya’s announcement of its combined Avaya-Nortel Enterprise Product Roadmap has broad implications across the UC space. However, for one group — the Nortel Embedded Customer — it has special significance. How stable will my existing platform be? Will I still have the same reseller? What upgrade path is recommended by Avaya? How will Avaya be handling futures such as business process integrations? These are some of the key questions embedded Avaya/Nortel customers have interest in understanding.

Avaya’s vision going forward is to focus on SIP and open standards; deliver CEBP solutions capabilities, and expand effective contextual collaboration. The watchwords of the roadmap are: Protect the existing product base, Extend the solutions into the future, and Grow solutions into the UC future. The roadmap is consistent with this vision.

Overall, the roadmap appears to be very complete and comprehensive. However, we will have to wait to see how effective the execution of the roadmap and handling of each individual situation is before we can say that the Avaya/Nortel integration is fully successful. “The devil is in the details,” can certainly apply. Here’s an expansion of these major concerns and, how Avaya’s Roadmap addresses them. 

1. Future of My Products – Embedded Nortel customers are rightfully concerned about the future of their installed and working Nortel products. Will they be killed immediately? How long will they be supported (both hardware and software)? Is there a transition to current or future products? 

The announced roadmap answers virtually all Nortel customers’ product concerns in a way that should allow a sigh of relief.  The overall roadmap objective is to protect customer investments and provide an evolutionary path to the future of enterprise communications – with a SIP focused (through Avaya’s Aura) transformation to that future. Specifically, all products remain available for sale throughout 2010 (NMC and MCS 5100 will be going end-of sale during 2011, to be announced later in 2010). Essentially there will be at least 6 years from the end of sale announcement before a product goes out of support. A product identified for “End-of-Sale” will have additional sales available for at least 9 months before “End of Orderability.” Software, for enterprise products, has one year of manufacturer support and then an option of 5 years of extended support. Software for SME products has one year of manufacturer support and then integrated support by reseller partners. Hardware has 3 years of manufacturer support with an additional 3 years of support as a paid for option.  For all intents, all currently installed Nortel products will be supported at least through 2013 for software and hardware. This is a generous plan that should serve to allow most customers to develop and execute on their future plans without fear of “not enough time”. There will certainly be exceptions. And if you are in a unique situation, certainly have your Nortel, now Avaya reseller bring your case forward for special consideration.

2. Future of My Channel Partner – Will I be able to keep working with my existing reseller/channel partner or will I have to move to another one? Do I get a choice if I change my reseller?

Avaya’s commitment to channel partners hasn’t always been good. However, the current plan of transitioning a majority of its customer sales and support to its channel partners is sincere and, with the Nortel acquisition, Avaya claims over 80% of its sales are now through channels, up from about 60% before the acquisition. Avaya has launched its new channel/reseller program, termed Avaya Connect. Connect allows any existing Nortel reseller to become an Avaya resale partner and gives them a generous timeframe, qualification options and incentives for achieving the required training and certifications to become an Avaya channel partner and to sell and support the on-going Avaya product line. Thus, if your reseller wants to continue to support its current Nortel customers long-term, it can. Not all will choose to nor will they all succeed. However, Avaya appears to be strongly committed to keeping the Nortel customer base and transitioning them to the current and future Avaya solutions. And Avaya Connect has the ability to achieve that objective — again the details of execution are yet to be seen. Especially for the SME space, Avaya is thoroughly committed to the channel sales model and has embraced Nortel’s Service Provider channel strength across the portfolio.

3. Migration of My Enterprise and SME Products – My existing system may be pretty old or it might be reasonably current, is there a migration program for me?

All of Nortel’s UC products have plans for eventual migration to an Avaya product solution. In general, the migration strategy is to upgrade the Nortel product to its current incarnation (e.g., migrate Meridian to CS1000) and then, for Enterprises, connect to Avaya Aura via SIP and open standards, and add additional UC applications going forward. For SME, the long-term path is to migrate Norstar/BCM to IP Office or, stay with SCS, which will be continued as the SIP/datacenter-based SME solution.

The overall migration objectives are: move to a common platform for communications, messaging and collaboration; continue Nortel’s ACE, integrated with Aura, as an applications platform going forward, evolve to common Aura Presence and IM, move to common management and analytics and evolve towards common SIP phones, clients and video solutions.

While individual migration plans exist for each product, we will only discuss two here:

a. CS1000 - At least two additional releases of CS1000 (are planned) and upgrades and extensions will be continued beyond these releases. CS1000 will be connected to Aura (in the next release R7) and the SIP phones on CS1000 (Series 1100/1200) will be able to connect directly to Aura.

b. Norstar/BCM - Norstar and BCM sales will continue at least through 2011. During 2010/11, all of the existing Avaya and Nortel SME platforms will converge/integrate into SIP-enabled IP Office as Avaya’s Best-of-Breed SME solution. This will take place via the following releases (6.0 in 2010 – Partner and Aura compliance for branches, 7.0 in 2011 – BCM and Norstar – retaining many features, interfaces and phones as well as management choice). SCS continues as a separate stream.

4. What about Applications? – I have committed to Nortel’s ACE. What happens to those applications and integrations?

From an applications perspective, Nortel’s ACE platform will be continued and renamed as “Avaya Agile Communications Environment.” ACE will extend Aura’s applications framework; extend Avaya’s Contact Center; incorporate Avaya’s Application Enablement Environment and extended APIs. And ACE packaged applications become available to Avaya Aura; and will support multi-vendor integration, including IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and others.

In conclusion, the combined Avaya/Nortel Roadmap and plans certainly indicates that the new Avaya finds significant value in the Nortel products and customers and is committed to keeping and growing the base. Execution over the next period will be the indication of how well the program will succeed.