This morning, January 19th, the day before the presidential inauguration, Avaya filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. What happens now and how the company moves forward are key concerns for Avaya customers, employees, and the market in general. Having been through a somewhat similar event with Nortel in 2009, there are a few things that we probably can predict as well as some key questions.
As you may have heard, Rockstar has filed its first set of lawsuits using the vast Nortel patent portfolio. Rockstar is the legal entity created by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony to buy the Nortel patents. They outbid Google to the sum of $4.5B to buy a large set of core patents in the telecommunications space. The patents were far ranging as Nortel had limited the distribution of patents in business sales to those that were only used in that business. So all the general and valuable cross-portfolio patents were held by Nortel to the end and sold to Rockstar.
Avaya recently declared an increase in momentum for its Avaya Data Solutions (ADS) business unit, which has already generated four consecutive quarters of growth.