On January 19th Avaya outlined its product roadmap following the amalgamation of Nortel Enterprise Solutions, focusing its strategy on ‘vision' rather than ‘pragmatism' as a way to manage the overlapping product ranges. John Chapman, Director at Comms Dealer sister publication IT Europa, an ICT research house, assesses the roadmap and its implications for the channel.

SIP is at the heart of the new Avaya vision. At the enterprise level the Avaya Aura product becomes the flagship. For Nortel customers, there will be limited investment in the CS1000 range, but if they need to expand their existing systems Avaya will still provide upgrades for numbers of lines and users. However, these customers will also have the opportunity to add the Avaya Aura alongside their CS1000 products and use its SIP-based architecture to handle the expansion of users and lines.

Positioning Aura as the way forward for existing Nortel customers matches Avaya's strategy for its own enterprise customers. In fact, Aura can sit alongside many other vendors' products to provide a SIP-based environment. This strategy, however, is not a clearing away of the Nortel technology because at the heart of Aura's evolution is the incorporation of Nortel's ACE technology.

ACE provides a vital SIP-based middleware functionality, enabling business applications to use the communications and conferencing facilities of the UC systems. Nortel was ahead of Avaya in this area, and this gives the combined company an advantage as enterprises look to improve their business processes.

At a Contact Centre level, where Avaya dominates at the top end of the market and Nortel the mid-market, the strategy again is to move to a SIP-based environment. The long-term objective is to move to a single product that will cover both the mid-market and large enterprise sectors. This will be achieved by investing heavily in research and development of the Nortel CCS7 product. Firstly, functionality will be enhanced, based around a vision of all contact centre calls being a conference session as standard. Additionally, the CCS8 release will include much of the functionality of Avaya's enterprise product, and finally it will be redesigned to scale from mid-market to major enterprise.

At the SME level, Avaya is again using the vision of a SIP-based future to make sense of a complex array of existing products. Avaya had already made moves to make IP Office its flagship product in the SME segment, and this will continue with development work to integrate existing Nortel Norstar and BCM systems and functionality. Avaya will continue to provide a future for existing products, but will move towards IP Office and SIP-based devices as the architecture of the future for SMEs.

The Nortel data products are an integral part of Avaya's vision, and the vendor plans to develop the functionality and enhance its presence in the datacentre, enterprise, branch and wireless segments of the market. Details on plans for data products were scant, but Avaya says it will be investing in higher end, higher complex areas to enable real-time communications and collaboration applications.

While outlining its product roadmap Ayaya talked about its services offerings and channel centricity. Avaya has already implemented a ‘follow the sun' support model for software and hardware technical support, and it is busy working on extending the managed operational services and building tools for partners to front this service to their clients. The whole go-to-market strategy for services will be based around the channel.

The final set of announcements were around Avaya's channel programs which will be key to success. The vendor announced new channel initiatives in October 2009 and will be rolling them out this month. These will be extended to the Nortel Partners in April 2010. With such a complex product set, particularly in the short-term after the merger, Avaya will be simplifying certifications based around systems like Unified Communications and Contact Centres. These certifications will be consistent across the world.

This is a well thought out roadmap. Basing its product roadmap around SIP has enabled Avaya to cut through the product department in-fighting and protectionism that is so classic in such a megamerger. It also gives a clear way forward to both its channel partners and customers. The channel should see this move positively as it offers a good product set with a clear and strong future direction. It also brings opportunities to use these products as the base for building a services portfolio, as well as taking them deeper into the business applications market.

It is this last area where Avaya perhaps needs to show more initiative. The vendor needs to start building partnerships with the ISV community as a matter of urgency. Avaya then needs to help channel partners engage with these ISVs to deliver the new business applications. This is where Avaya could make a significant difference, ensuring channel partners are successful.