Avaya has announced its integrated product roadmap following the $900m acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions late last year.
At the heart of the Avaya-Nortel combined vision is unified communications, in particular the Avaya Aura platform. Aura, launched almost a year ago, is a fully SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] based platform for unified communications.
Rather than “rip and replace”, the best of Nortel and Avaya products will coexist, Avaya vice president Alan Baratz said in a news conference. Aura will plug into existing Avaya or Nortel PBXs and “play nicely” with them, adding value and reducing total cost of ownership in the process.
According Baratz, the aim with Aura and across the combined product set was to: “Bring together the best of the Nortel product portfolio with the best of the Avaya portfolio to create significant business value for customers.
Sitting on top of the Aura platform will be APIs, including Nortel products such as the Agile Communications Environment (ACE), which provides application enablement.
“The Aura architecture becomes a blending of the best technology from Avaya and the best technologies from Nortel,” said Baratz.
Aura would also be central to the company’s plans in the contact centre space.
One area where Nortel customers will notice a change is in support. Avaya intends to scrap Nortel’s fixed fee for support, which meant that the same fee was charged no matter how long or complex the problem.
“Nortel lost money on every single one of those,” said Todd Abbott, Avaya’s senior vice president of sales, significantly contributing to its lack of profitability.
In its place will be a service that Abbott said would have a more “industry standard” approach.