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.
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Proprietery Nortel technology
Are there products that provide the ability to connect Nortel's proprietery UNISTIM to a standards-based SIP?
If so, would that allow current customers to preserve their investment in Nortel products?
Nortel Proprietary solutions
Nortel has a product called the Software Communications Server that is a pure SIP based VoIP system. It runs on common off the shelf servers. It also uses Polycom, LG-Nortel, or Nortels 1200 & 1100 series IP phones. This is the type of thing that would allow current Nortel customers to migrate to and save their existing Nortel sets, which can be a tremendous cost savings.
Reality check, I expected NW to be better informed
Hello, Unistim is a stimulus protocol based on Megaco. There is no standard for communicating button presses on a phone, Cisco has Skinny, Avaya has thier own proprietary stimulus protocol. How can you mix SIP or h.323 with Unistim? When customers switch from Unistim to a SIP implementation with RFC 2833 inband DTMF signalling they lose over seven hundred features/functions. Welcome to the SIP world. Nortel has done an excellent job of intgrating VoIP technologies into their existing systems bringing all of the traditional TDM functionality to the IP world. Not many other vendors had that luxury.
Nortel's enterprise business is so attractive that Avaya is just one of three bidders in a very heated and contentious bidding war which proves the overall value of Nortel is obvious to the main players in the industry.
Even if for arguements sake Nortel just disappeared, there would be a third party gray after market vendors supporting solutions from Nortel well into the next decade. Keep in mind that the US and Canadian governments are some of the largest users of Nortel technologies such as the Social Security administratin and the U.S. Post office.
Nortel Enterprise solutions have been profitable for the last eight consecutive quarters. Potential buyers of enterprise know it is a powerful portfolio with deeply loyal customers. Don't expect all that to just disappear, that's a Cisco pipedream!
customers
Nortel customers should be well informed of the changes and plans with regards to this issue.
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