For those of you that didn't attend Avaya's webinar (or just want some key take-aways) read on...
Firstly I thought it might be good to remind you why the joining of these two telecommunications giants is a big thing for the UC community.
1. Nortel and Avaya have a combined Unified Communications revenue share of 32%, bigger than any other competitor (see illustration below)
2. Avaya's CS1000 (previously Nortel) as of rel 5.5 supports integration with OCS 2007, OCS 2007 R2, Microsoft Exchange 2007, Nortel SCS and Avaya Aura + more
3. The Nortel/Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance continues (they play nice with some of the Redmond UC guys!)
So what is changing?
First the CS1000...
Throughout the keynote participants were asking about the life of their CS1000 or Meridian investments, Avaya consistently delivered the message that development will continue, rel 7.0 in 2010 and further releases planned subsequently. Given Avaya's policies on end of life support, should the CS1000 be dropped today, end users would be covered until 2017 (as mentioned previously, this is not planned).
Contact Center
Avaya has interestingly decided to continue to develop Nortel's Contact Center product, initially placing it for mid-market. From what I can gather their plan is to scale up future versions in view of replacing Avaya's Contact Center:
"With that as the architectural approach that both we and the Nortel Enterprise Solutions team agreed was the right direction, we started looking at our various products and product sets. And what we found was that within the Nortel Enterprise Solutions product portfolio is a product known as CC7. The team believed in the architecture that I described earlier, but they were well on the path to pursuing that. Their CC7 product has a number of the elements, the core elements of that architecture. It was designed to operate in a multi-vendor environment. It could operate on top of Avaya Aura and the session manager environment. As a result of that what we decided was that CC7 would become the midmarket Contact Center solution for Avaya going forward. Midmarket because today CC7 doesn't have the scale or the fault tolerance required to operate in the high end enterprise environment. Our road is to continue with the Avaya Contact Center solution, CC elite, but to move to CC7 for the midmarket."
Unified Communications
To finish off the keynote an analyst from Forester spoke of how positive an effect this would have on the Avaya/Nortel proposition (at this point I was drifting), however he did echo the views that UC adoption is growing and overall a 1/3 of all new business opportunities are within this space.
A full transcript is available here