They came to us to offer that deal and we turned them down, and now they’re coming back to try again, said Karyn Mashima, senior VP of strategy and technology at the Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based vendor of enterprise telephony infrastructure.
Mashima said a deal would have required licensing what constitutes Avaya’s crown jewels to Microsoft, which Nortel, struggling in the enterprise market, was prepared to do. I guess it was something Nortel felt was worth giving up, she said.
She said the reason Microsoft has returned to woo Avaya is that they’re realizing the alliance with Nortel is not powerful enough to overcome an incumbent like us or Cisco. It’s fine for the Nortel installed base, but Microsoft is getting asked a lot by its customers about the relationship with us.
While refusing to relinquish call control to the ISV from Redmond for anything other than a very big price, Mashima said Avaya continues to work on integrating with Microsoft’s desktop environment, messaging, conferencing, .NET, and Active Directory, a relationship that it replicated with IBM.
Meanwhile, regarding the recent SaaS announcement with Google around its web-based office productivity services, she said it should not be interpreted as in any way a riposte to Microsoft/Nortel. That’s a different play, she said. They’re into social networking and small and mid-sized companies.
As for Microsoft’s ambitions in the corporate world with the Nortel partnership, Mashima said: Microsoft has no credibility in voice. Even after the development work with Nortel that is part of the four-year Innovative Communications Alliance, in four years I don’t believe enterprise will get what they need from [Microsoft’s] Office Communications Server, she said.
Another component in the ICA deal is the services that the Canadian company will provide to design, install, and maintain Unified Comms infrastructure for their common customers. Microsoft needs a servicing capability, though Nortel doesn’t have it yet, because they went through distribution for enterprise so didn’t have their own services, she said. She added that Avaya will be putting a lot more resources into services, as well as into app development for its Unified Comms offerings, to rival anything the ICA partners come up with.
A lot of what Avaya will be offering in the area of Unified Comms will be with the Microsoft platform, though it will equally work with IBM. Microsoft clearly has every interest in maintaining relationships with all the IP PBX vendors in order to guarantee PSTN break-in and -out for OCS.
Avaya has announced more integration work with Microsoft of late, though Mashima acknowledged that while much of what Avaya/Microsoft will be able to offer will be on a par with ICA, in one area at least there are no plans to work together: the branch office UC device Nortel and Microsoft announced in their high-profile ICA progress report earlier this year.
