Moderated by: David Powis, Vanguard Communications
The latest telecom news hit the online Wall Street Journal on March 12th; "Nortel Is in Talks to Sell Key Units to Rivals." What nearly made me spill my breakfast tea was that one of the units being discussed “builds telecom systems for offices.” Wow. Then to top that, the entities reported to be in talks with Nortel are Siemens and Avaya. (The article reports that Cisco was not interested in the unit).
From a sheer market grabbing move, this would be big for the winner. Could Siemens catch up or overtake Avaya worldwide in marketshare? If Avaya wins, they will have a huge number of large enterprise customers.
There are some technologies that fill a product gap (e.g., Nortel’s solid IVR platform would fill a gap for Siemens). The acquisition would give Siemens a larger distribution footprint in the U.S. For Avaya, it’s an opportunity to take a long time competitor out of circulation, and to focus on others. But either way, there is going to be considerable solution overlap.
But what happens to Nortel customers? There is no simple migration path, so users will have to eventually replace existing Nortel platforms. Whatever happens is bound to create confusion and angst with any plans or strategies Nortel shops may have been pulling together. When the Aspect/Rockwell merger happened, there were a lot of conversations about parallel platform support and development over the next several years, but at some point there has to be a unifying platform or migration strategy. The question is, will that be somewhere existing Nortel customers want to go? Anyone out there have a thoughts or comments on this one? If you’re a Nortel customer, what do you think your options are?
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