Watch out Cisco, here comes Avaya!
Today, while taking a break from playing with some gear in the Alta3 Research labs, I found an interesting article while running a search on ‘SIP’ in GoogleNews. Not-so-surprisingly, Avaya’s name popped up in several headlines. As I just finished helping write Alta3 Research’s course on Avaya SIP Trunking, I thought this might be an opportune time to comment on why Avaya and SIP are becoming so intimately entwined.
Avaya recently made a press statement at the U.S./Gov Sales Leadership and Partner Conference, reminding the public that they have released 60+ products in less than two years- more than Avaya had released in the last decade of operation. Additionally, Avaya has begun touting that their Flair Experience collaboration will soon integrate with both Apple and Android mobile devices.
This announcement comes as Avaya has been making steady gains on telephony competitors, such as Cisco. In July of 2011, in the wake of laying off 6,500 Cisco employees, Cisco CEO John Chambers acknowledged that Cisco had become lackadaisical in it’s once unparalleled ability to be both lead and drive the market. In a memo, Chambers stated that he is looking to take “bold steps” to refocus a company that has become lost by attempting to compete in an excessive number of markets.
In the meantime, Avaya’s president of Global Communication Solutions , Alan Baratz, stated that the growth of Avaya’s product line directly parallels the growth of SIP technologies. Per Alan Baratz-
“The important and compelling thing about SIP is that it’s all about sessions: it can carry the IP, it can carry video, it can carry IM, maybe other new types of traffic,” Baratz said. “It means you can have a single control infrastructure supporting all of that communication. That enables a lot of really compelling capabilities for the end customer, including cheaper infrastructure, and a more unified experience for the end user- up until now, for Avaya, it really has been all about voice, but now, on the same platform, we can do video, we can do web collaboration, we can do IM, everything, so we need to start investing in those other modes of communication…”
While the growth of SIP technology has been apparent for the past decade ( since 1997, SIP Fundamentals and SIP Essentials have been among Alta3 Research’s most requested class ), it’s great to hear that Avaya’s products are gaining market share. While helping to write the new Avaya SIP training class was a blast, the true reward comes in actually teaching the material- and bringing a new level of understanding to those eager to learn!
Read the full article at CRN