UC Vendors Present Options for Nortel Customers and Channel Partners

In this Executive Insights podcast, Jim Burton, Blair Pleasant, Steve Leaden, and Marty Parker introduce the "Options for Nortel Customers and Channel Partners" series of presentations.

UCStrategies offered UC vendors the opportunity to present their migration options for Nortel customers and channel partners now that Avaya has delivered its roadmap for Nortel products. The following companies chose to participate: Aastra, Interactive Intelligence, NEC, ShoreTel, Siemens, and the company that acquired Nortel, Avaya.

Each company provided a presentation (audio & slides) targeted to current Nortel customers or channel partners, each of which has been posted on this site. Follow the links in the table below to view each of the presentations.

	Aastra: Options for Nortel Customers
	Avaya: Options for Nortel Customers
	Interactive Intelligence: Options for Nortel Customers
	NEC: Options for Nortel Customers
	NEC: Options for Nortel Customers
	ShoreTel: Options for Nortel Customers
	ShoreTel: Options for Nortel Channel Partners
	Siemens: Options for Nortel Customers

UCStrategies encourages your comments on this podcast. Please see the "Comments" section at the bottom of this page to contribute.

Jim Burton: Welcome to a special Executive Insights podcast. This is Jim Burton and joining me today are UC experts Blair Pleasant, Marty Parker, and Steve Leaden. Our topic today is, "Options for Nortel Customers." I would like to start by thanking some of the UCStrategies team that helped shape this event: Michael Finneran, Dave Michels, David Yedwab, Don Van Doren, and Byron Battles.

I think it's important for all those listening to understand our objective here, and maybe a good way to start is to read our mission statement. "UCStrategies is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, systems integrators, and anyone interested in the growing Unified Communications arena. A supplier of objective information on Unified Communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communications industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in various segments of Unified Communications since its inception."

In fact, we started UCStrategies over four years ago and have grown from the four founders to over 15 UC experts. Please visit our site regularly and as the name indicates, we are here to help you develop your UC strategy.

Ever since it was clear that Nortel would change ownership, many have suggested that UCStrategies have a webinar to discuss the options for Nortel customers. And as a supplier of objective information, we felt it important to provide information on all the options. And clearly, one of those options comes from the company that acquired Nortel, that being Avaya. We are pleased that Avaya has agreed to participate in this podcast. Several vendors have agreed to provide information specifically for this topic and that includes Aastra, Interactive Intelligence, NEC, ShoreTel, Siemens, and of course, Avaya. That doesn't mean that you should limit yourself in looking at UC options to those companies only. There are others that should be considered, for example, Cisco, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft, IBM, and HP.

Since our founding of UCStrategies, we have always said that the most important thing in developing a UC strategy is to first look at what your objective is. What are you trying to accomplish? Which business processes are you trying to impact? Look at that and then after you've reached a conclusion, take a look at what options you have and whether you need to replace your existing telephone system. That is part of what we are here to talk about today. What are all of those options?

Blair, I think you have some comments.

Blair Pleasant: Thanks, Jim. UCStrategies is at the forefront of Unified Communications helping to educate people about the UC industry. And as part of our mission, we really want to help educate the market about the various options available to them. So, we put together this podcast to let Nortel customers know what their options are and there are a number of choices available for Nortel customers, including using your existing legacy equipment. It's important to know that you don't need to throw out what you already have and you will hear from all of the participating vendors about their migration strategies. Whether you move forward with an Avaya solution or investigate another vendors' solutions, it is important to know what your options are. And as Jim mentioned, your strategy should be based on your business goals, your business processes, and where you want to be in the future.

Jim Burton: Thanks, Blair. Steve, I would like to turn to you. You have a number of customers who have been Nortel customers and are actually looking at what their options are. Can you share with us some of the guidance that you provide to your customers?

Steve Leaden: Sure, Jim. Let me just pause for a quick moment here and check a comment that I have been sharing with a lot of our Nortel enterprise customers. And that is, "It is a great time in this space to be a Nortel customer." And I will tell you why. Because A) Avaya wants to keep you as the successor of Nortel and there are a number of competitors out there that - again you will be able to click on links a little bit later - there are a number of competitors out there that also want your business. And not only are there technical areas that can do this, but there are also a number of incentive and discount programs available from the market at large that you can take advantage of as a Nortel customer. So, again, it's a great time to be a Nortel customer.

So, the choices are A) you can do nothing, which I would highly not recommend because you'll have end-of-life risk, etc. issues. You can go to the latest Nortel release, and you can sign on for an extended maintenance agreement if you have some legacy Nortel equipment, though you may not be able to get the latest and greatest feature sets, but you will at least be able to get sustenance and the sustained kind of extended maintenance program. You can also add Avaya Aura, or as I have been quoted in some international publications, you can do your "due diligence." So, I think that's where the Avaya choice is between Avaya and the other manufacturers.

So, interestingly everybody that Jim has quoted here from Interactive Intelligence to Aastra to Cisco, NEC, ShoreTel, Siemens, Avaya and others as well...including Mitel, are all offering what I would call layering technology, which allows you to add a layer of UC integration either in the cloud, in the data center, or even at any one of your own premise sites. With the understanding that a gateway would be added at each one of the local sites, as a layer on top of your existing Nortel infrastructure, which will effectively allow you a couple of things. Number one, you can optimize trunking and number two you can create some common dialing plans and there are some other venues in terms of reduced costs, as well as the going forward strategies.

So, again if you don't have Unified Communications in your environment right now, if you are looking for IM, chat, presence or other kinds of tools and you don't have that in your environment, the idea is that the Avaya Aura Session Manager and competitors can introduce their own standalone session manager and then behind it, a UC server, and other kinds of tools in order to give you the full UC. Interestingly, as you are doing your homework you will find that the layering server per se is really not a huge cost investment. So, you will find that there's little risk in going with one manufacturer over another. But when you start to look at all of your costs over time, from extended maintenance agreements to staying current with the most current Avaya releases, as well as other manufacturers to that as well. There is some investment that you have to do. My personal recommendation to all of our customers is, take a look at your Avaya Aura roadmap that is going on and the requirements for staying current with your existing Nortel products and then, b) also look at what the competition is offering. Because again, it is a very interesting time to be in the market. You are going to hear a lot about Avaya Aura, about nextgen - you are going to hear about a lot of that from other manufacturers as well. Again, just going back to my previous statement of having a great time - it is a great time to be a Nortel customer, it really is.

So just to summarize, Nortel customers will be offered a migration to the Avaya Aura product family using session manager to overlay CS1000 installations. Nortel Meridian customers would have to perform an interim upgrade to CS1000 to get it current to move to the Avaya Aura solution. So, the latest announcement is going to be Avaya Aura 6, which is released later this month and again, you are going to see the other manufacturers offer similar. Jim, I will hand the microphone back to you.

Jim Burton: Great, well thanks so much Steve. Let's turn it over to Marty Parker. And Marty, I would like to just have you provide some of the insights that you have and the advice that you have been giving your clients and then at the same time, talk about what a couple of the other options are, which could include gateways or doing nothing...how you keep your existing telephone system alive because that may work for some people for the next little while, while they are developing their strategy moving forward. So, Marty over to you.

Marty Parker: Thanks Jim. Well let me add to what Steve has just said so well. Yes, you certainly can add other communication systems side-by-side with your Nortel, using gateways. We have clients doing that already. So, that's definitely a solution. From the perspective of keeping your current system going, that is also a great possibility. Steve mentioned upgrading to the CS1000, which is a great SIP / IP communication platform and preserves the investment in your phones, because the telephones are a significant part of the investment here if you try to move to a new system.

Also, it's a great time to be shopping for maintenance. Avaya has new policies requiring that Nortel customers must have a maintenance agreement in order to get tier III and tier IV Avaya support, should their system have a problem. So, it's important to have a maintenance position and it's also a great time, because the Avaya business partners, as well as the Nortel business partners, are all available to serve you and in some cases they have consolidated and merged into larger single organizations for service. It's a good time to go shopping and put out a small request for quotes to look at improving your service level agreements, your remote maintenance and monitoring, your on-site service, and see what the total price might be. You might even find the ability to consolidate and get a reduction. One of our clients who was moving to Avaya already when the announcement was made, went to their Avaya vendor, who had just acquired one of the Nortel VARs, and found that they could bundle the Nortel and the Avaya maintenance together for a reduction in total out-of-pocket costs.

Finally, let me talk about unified communications. So far, most of the conversation in the marketplace has been around IP telephony and many of our sponsoring vendors are talking about moving your Nortel PBX to their IP telephony platform. But that's not where the big money is. As you know from other podcasts and other things we've written, the big money is in unified communications, applications, and use cases. And we really recommend you do that. I recommend you do it and you can look at this from a perspective of once you find those UC applications, then you can shop for just the technology you need for that application. It's quite possible to do that. And you find that you can overlay Microsoft Office Communications Server or IBM Same Time Server with your existing Nortel. If you find that the new applications move you to mobility, maybe it's the RIM Mobile Voice Server that would be of most importance to you. Or if you are thinking about starting the migration towards a new communication platform, then you can begin using that platform's UC desktop or mobile client, such as the Avaya 1X if you move to Avaya Aura or many of the other wonderful products that we feature in our VoiceCon-now Enterprise Connect-review of the marketplace. Some thirteen different vendors all have some excellent desktop capabilities that could be part and parcel of that gateway-connected new system that Steve suggested.

So, thanks Jim for offering me a chance to comment on this. Thanks to Steve and Blair for setting this up so well and back to you, Jim.

Jim Burton: Thanks Marty, and thank you also Blair and Steve...great insight. We all hope that this information is going to be helpful to the audience and please take a look at the various presentations that each vendor has provided. We have provided links on this page with that. But also, as I said earlier please remember these are not the only vendors who are providing a roadmap for Nortel customers, as I mentioned before - that list includes Cisco, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Thank you, everybody.