Page 3 of 3
Let's talk competitive displacement. You mentioned, from the stage, Cisco, Microsoft, ShoreTel and Genesys.
We've got a number of competitors in the UC space as well as the contact center space, in large enterprise and SME. They are doing interesting things worth pointing out.
OK, so looking at them individually, what is, say, ShoreTel's threat to Avaya?
I don't view ShoreTel as a threat today, and by the way, Microsoft isn't a threat today, either. The ShoreTel market share is very low. Microsoft's in UC in very low. At the same time, these are companies that have some interesting products in the market and that we want to be sure we get out in front of. We don't like surprises. For Lync, we are seeing it pop up. It's not rapid growth. But because we're seeing it pop up we want to get in front of it.
The other thing I've talked a lot about with solution providers is partnering with Avaya for hosted solutions. What is Avaya's strategy for offering hosted collaboration and hosted UC through partners?
We've spent a lot of time understanding, from the perspective of service providers, from customers, from Avaya, what the value of cloud is. We think that for large enterprises, the forms of cloud that will be of value are private cloud and dedicated hosted, not multi-tenant hosted. It's just not really there for the end customer, and there's the risk associated with trying to move infrastructure into a multi-tenant hosted environment. But private clouds, yes, basically using cloud-based technologies in your own data center, things like virtualization. We are committed to enabling our product set to leverage all those cloud-based technologies, by, for example, virtualizing across our product line.
In the SME space, it's a different story. There, multi-tenant hosted does make sense, so we're going after multi-tenant hosted versions of our SME environment in addition to premise-based versions. Finally, there's hybrid cloud, when you put some of the applications in the cloud, like maybe messaging or conferencing, or your IVR in the cloud, or your IVR overflow if you exceed your premise-based capacity. We will support those models as well.
So there is an opportunity for non-service provider VARs to sell that with Avaya?
Whoever wants to.
Is there a lot left for Avaya to do on the Nortel integration, or even a little? Are we completely there at this point?
We're pretty much there at this point. We've finished it in contact center with Avaya Aura Contact Center, we've finished it in SME with IP Office 7.0, and we've almost finished it in the UC space. We have delivered two releases of CS1000 and integrated Session Manager into the CS1000, so we now have the ability for non-Nortel SIP phones to get attached into the Avaya [infrastructure]. We've started building out the strategic Avaya feature server into the CS1000 base. We haven't finished that off yet.
Is there anything else that will be put on end-of-life in the Nortel portfolio?
Nothing that we haven't already talked about. I think we've communicated all the plans at this point.
<< Previous
|
1
|
2
|
3


