Avaya, Nortel, and Skype

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paulej
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Avaya, Nortel, and Skype

Post by paulej »

Folks,

For those of us in the industry, it is hard to ignore the fact that Avaya, Nortel's enterprise telephony business, and Skype will all be controlled (directly or indirectly) by the investment firm Silver Lake. See this:
http://www.dailypayload.com/content/3274

Do you think they plan to play strongly both as an equipment provider and as a carrier, or are these really disjoint efforts that just look really interesting on the surface?

Paul
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matt
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Re: Avaya, Nortel, and Skype

Post by matt »

The path of least resistance says that it only appears interesting on the surface, and that the investment firm is simply broadening its industry portfolio. I'm inclined to believe that, given the amount of effort it would take to coordinate those three disparate companies.

That said, it seems like it could be a conscious effort to get an early position into the Google Voice competitive space. I'm not exactly sure what the play would be, but I'm thinking something like selling hard phones which integrate deeply with Skype and are supported by call centers?
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paulej
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Re: Avaya, Nortel, and Skype

Post by paulej »

My personal opinion that the Avaya/Nortel merger is a bad idea. There are some good products and engineers on both sides, but the fact is that they compete directly with each other. How can two companies struggling to make a profit bring together overlapping product portfolios and then expect to do better? The only rationale that makes sense to me is that they're removing a major competitor from the market.

The Skype element is really interesting. They would not necessarily have to merge the Skype technology with the Avaya/Nortel products, but work to ensure that the SIP trunk offered by Skype works flawlessly with their equipment. They would also need to have extremely favorable pricing. In that way, every customer can be offered an option to bypass the incumbent carrier with some very attractive prices.

Perhaps the days when an enterprise is charged a high monthly "line charge" for every incoming line are over?
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