What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source
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@coliver said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
Didn't Avaya buy them all? I thought they were last big name legacy vendor around.
Avaya bought Nortel when Nortel went bankrupt. They created a bridge between their systems so that Nortel customers wouldn't be forced in to fork lift upgrades. This kept Avaya from having to compete with other vendors that would have to put in entirely new systems.
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Also I know that Avaya practiced "security through obscurity." There was a common back door password in to all the Avaya systems.
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Seeing as I work for an Avaya Reseller/Partner, this is not good. I've tried to convince management we need to go into a different direction (as in selling and supporting open source solutions) but seems to fall on deaf ears.
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We're Mitel here. And like @jt1001001 our Mitel vendor things that any non black box solution is just crap and doesn't work - they sell fear on those systems by claiming that they have ripped out tons of them and replaced them with Mitel.
I'm sure it's mostly FUD, and when not FUD, the issue is that someone not qualified to put something like FreePBX in place is the reason is failed.
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The whole thought - oh well it's free therefore I might be able to install it myself without any paid help support - is a real problem.
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Getting the general public to understand that open source doesn't mean free I think is a critical thing - and once the general public understands it, SMBs might actually understand this as well.
And before Scott jumps on me
about how there are way fewer SMBs than there are people in public - my experience has been that SMB owners are in general no more educated than the general public. Hence all the ads in the airports for crap from Barracuda. -
@scottalanmiller upvote X 10
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@momurda said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
What is the condition of other traditional pbx vendors? Are they all in or near dire straits as well?
It varies and most are corporations with little visibility. Avaya carries a lot of debt from before that doesn't affect ShoreTel or Cisco. But it seems likely that any are doing great from their phone divisions. Appliance PBX isn't a generally good option.
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@coliver said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
@momurda said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
What is the condition of other traditional pbx vendors? Are they all in or near dire straits as well?
Didn't Avaya buy them all? I thought they were last big name legacy vendor around.
Cisco, Mitel, ShoreTel, NEC
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@jt1001001 said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
Seeing as I work for an Avaya Reseller/Partner, this is not good. I've tried to convince management we need to go into a different direction (as in selling and supporting open source solutions) but seems to fall on deaf ears.
Sorry to hear.
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Real world irony - I've gotten 72 metric shit0tonnes of spam from Avaya today. Probably seen them once or twice before, today I've deleted at least a dozen messages from them.
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@RojoLoco said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
Real world irony - I've gotten 72 metric shit0tonnes of spam from Avaya today. Probably seen them once or twice before, today I've deleted at least a dozen messages from them.
Desperation.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
@RojoLoco said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
Real world irony - I've gotten 72 metric shit0tonnes of spam from Avaya today. Probably seen them once or twice before, today I've deleted at least a dozen messages from them.
Desperation.
Clawing at the edge of the drain so rapidly circling them.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
@RojoLoco said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
Real world irony - I've gotten 72 metric shit0tonnes of spam from Avaya today. Probably seen them once or twice before, today I've deleted at least a dozen messages from them.
Desperation.
Possibly. Certainly not irony.
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Feels like they are in their final hours. Sure they are only in Chap 11, but how will they come back from that?
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So Scott - you mention in that SW thread that they shouldn't invest anymore into avaya stuff - what if they needed another 30 extensions? Should they buy the 30 extra phones or somehow spin those off to another system?
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@Dashrender said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
So Scott - you mention in that SW thread that they shouldn't invest anymore into avaya stuff - what if they needed another 30 extensions? Should they buy the 30 extra phones or somehow spin those off to another system?
Depends, if it is a real investment, no they should not buy them. If you have 30,000 phones and need 30 more, that's just "daily maintenance" and whatever. If you only have 30 and you need 30 more, put that money towards something better and forward looking. It depends if the money is just "routine spend" or an investment.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
@Dashrender said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
So Scott - you mention in that SW thread that they shouldn't invest anymore into avaya stuff - what if they needed another 30 extensions? Should they buy the 30 extra phones or somehow spin those off to another system?
Depends, if it is a real investment, no they should not buy them. If you have 30,000 phones and need 30 more, that's just "daily maintenance" and whatever. If you only have 30 and you need 30 more, put that money towards something better and forward looking. It depends if the money is just "routine spend" or an investment.
And for a course of action in that situation of having 30 and getting 30 more, you could easily spin up FreePBX, buy 30 Yealink phones, buy a Grandstream HT704 (4 FXS ports) and plug them into 4 POTS ports on the legacy system and do some inter-system calling. Been there done that, burned the t-shirt.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:
The issue now with Avaya is that we can no longer have confidence that they will be able to survive to continue to support their products. An investment like this in something like storage often requires a five to ten year confidence window, with a PBX this is generally more like ten to twenty years.
This isn't quite true. They filed Chapt 11, not 7. They had too much debt from previous acquisitions. Given the real money in PBX"s is milking support renewals and phone replacements they can EASILY zombie on for another 10 years. Hell while eON did this for a good 10 of it's 20 years someone still bought them (Professional Teledata) and will swap parts and deal with phone replacements still even after their death. There is just too much money charging crazy uplifts on ancient phone systems. Avaya had the best contact center platform in the industry and that gold mine of high dollar per user systems will attract a buyer to secure. That said it's not a growing market.
I'll agree that I wouldn't choose them for my primary phone system if doing a greenfield deployment.
For regular corporate users anyone of any size has a Microsoft ELA, and likely is going to get Lync/S4B wether they want it or not. Given that Microsoft is the worlds largest phone company (Skype terminates more PSTN than anyone) and it's almost inevitable that they end up handling 1/2 this market.
For small shops, they are going to buy generic SIP phones and 1-2 of many incredibly cheap systems. Open source or not you can throw a rock and hit something cheap (CudaTel I was fairly impressed with).
The death of the PBX industry is being driven partly by open systems replacing proprietary, and maybe by open source, but there are far bigger threats.
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Cell phones. We are past "peak" landline call volume. People would rather have 1 number and carry it with them. Unlimited calling plans do quite a bit here and a lot of us don't need to transfer calls to anyone ever. This impact is SLIGHTLY blunted in the US (We have incredibly high mobile costs)
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Non-voice communication. Slack, email, txt, hangouts, and a bazillion other means of communicating without vice have taken over. A lot of calls done for ordering are now done by app or website. When was the last time you called Amazon about something?
I would argue that even VOIP at this point is comparable with being a voice mail programming guy (I learned VMIII sadly at one point). It's a dying industry and not worth time investing your skills in.
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