Nortel Customers Fear The Future

What will happen to the thousands of Nortel enterprise customers?

In the past twenty years, Nortel has built a large market share in the enterprise voice markets, accumulating thousands of customers across the globe. Now, with a potential buyer on the horizon, many Nortel customers are fairly asking: "What now?"

Customers of Nortel's enterprise architecture solutions are familiar with the proprietary delivery of communications solutions, formulated around the central idea: "Stay within the lines of Nortel, and you'll be fine." Especially in the realm of VoIP, Nortel's focus around their proprietary UNISTIM protocol sheltered customers away from standards-based solutions such as SIP and H.323.

Now, with the future of Nortel's enterprise solutions in the balance, customers may have wished for a progressive migration towards standards-based technologies. What becomes of the surplus of proprietary hardware that will eventually be phased out in the light of standards-based technology?

With rumors of an Avaya bid on the Nortel table, one has to wonder: Does Avaya really want to inherit this mess? Aside from a large customer base, such a migration plan from Nortel to Avaya could become a complicated, drawn-out affair.

• SMB
• VoIP / Convergence
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