Interesting. Seems like Cisco's taken a pretty decent bit out of both Avaya and Nortel if they are both trying to figure their strategies out and possibly merge.
Re: Report says Avaya in talks for private-equity buyout.
Funny how all the financial rags say Cisco would consider buying Avaya. Why would they buy technology they already have that seems to be successful in wrestling market share away from their competitors?
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True, but you would hardly
True, but you would hardly class Cisco in the same league as someone like Avaya when it comes to delivering applications in the contact centre space for example. Intelligent applications is the direction where most analysts would agree the market is going and Cisco is some way behind players like Avaya and Genesys in this respect. That said, I cannot imagine Cisco buying Avaya just for the apps jewels.
I suppose that from a pure
I suppose that from a pure contact center bells and whistles perspective, some other players may have a leg up but you have to admit that the features that matter to 95%+ people in the contact center space are in Cisco's products already. Factor in the other "intelligent applications" like mobility, security, user interfaces, management, support, collaboration, video, and integration and Cisco really has a compelling story for most customers. Sorry to sound like such a Cisco bigot because there are clearly different products that are right for different people. It just seems like Cisco's been very good in the Unified Communications space at listening to what the customer wants and delivering it instead of what a lot of their competitors do which is develop a technology and then tell the customers what they need.
Unified Communications Mangler
The only thing Unified about Communications Mangler is the name. As far as contact center is concerned, Geotel is woefully outgunned compared to just about everything else on the market.
How can a solution that has been cobbled together from at least 10 different acqisitions be considered unified. Please do explain the Open interfaces. They are still almost exclusively based on SCCP (proprietary) including telepresence. They were last to market on SIP, linux, and Presence among the major vendors by almost a year. Listen to customers???? Multiple security strategies, Multiple wireless strategies, and multiple NAC strategies all causing customer headaches. They ported all of their problems from 4.1 to 5.0 when they finally got into the SIP game. Customers were told that this would be fixed in 6.0 along with the unification of features that were in their 4.2 windows implementation. Now 6.0 is out and guess what....Still waiting for the promised unification of software.
On the bright side, if they buy Avaya they can just add unified to the Avaya Communications manager and the merger will be complete!!!!
I beg to ask what is unified
I beg to ask what is unified about Avaya ACM? They have tied old school TDM hardware together finally after all of these years and vendors such as Geotel and Genesys have been feeding them since they could bring multiple TDM sites together from an enterprise perspective. When is Avaya going to finally move CMS to something web-based? I see the only good software that Avaya can active on their TDM switches is the advocate software. Outside of Advocate, I see Avaya losing deals to Cisco all the time. I also find Avaya's partnership with network vendors such as Extreme and Juniper to be somewhat comical. Juniper and Extreme network gear is light years behind the industry leading Cisco technology. Then, let’s looks at the partners that Avaya has as it relates to partners that Cisco has in the contact center space. Cisco has strong contact center partnership out there that can deliver results. On the Avaya side, you need to engage multiple vendors because the majority of the Avaya partners only know the old school TDM bare bones application and do not understand how to support and maintain other contact center applications that companies are in need of today. Let's look at Avaya's multi-channel applications such as IC and Contact Center Express. Come on now, please be realistic. If I recall correctly, Avaya IC is based on acquisition software from Nabnasset, which still has not evolved to now where near what the Cisco ICM platform can provide to the customer base.
Should we even begin to start discussions around Cisco’s IVR strategy compared to Avaya’s IVR stategy?
Unify This and drink more koolaid!
C'mon have an original thought that did not come from your Cisco reps lil playbook. How pathetic it must be to follow that logic like a lil lost pup. Avaya and Nortel are true Unified Communications companies. Cisco is a great Unified Marketing Company. And for you to say that Cisco is Light years ahead of anyone with their technology just proves my point about the nature of their whacked out cult following.
I express my opinion based
I express my opinion based on having implemented both technologies in ACM, IC, CCM and IPCC. I have also worked with both IVR platforms in AVP and CVP so I can with experience and with no sales fluff.
Are you really going to say that Cisco is not light years away in the networking space?
You should drink some more koolaid.
I beg to ask what is unified
Advocate?
Yes this might be cool technology but it only works when you have > 1000 agents. Most contact center are in 200 agent space. Case in point: the only customer AVAYA keeps on bringing as a reference is Victoria Secret.