What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source
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Recent events have led Avaya, the giant PBX vendor, to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection. This, in turn, has led current and potential customers to ask how this affects them; and this is an excellent question. Current customers have existing technical debt and any risk that they will incur has already happened, outside of being prepared for a suddenly lack of support there is little for them to do.
New customers or potential customers need to rethink their telephony strategy. Avaya is a closed source appliance (black box) and buying the appliance is not what your money is spent on, it is being spent on the support that comes from Avaya. While the appliance itself isn't bad, it's just an appliance and in many ways is inferior to other options (such as a virtual machine.)
Because of the closed nature, Avaya is a necessary component of the viability of the appliance. Should Avaya fail completely, the device's value literally drops to zero. That doesn't mean that it will stop functioning immediately, but it means that should anything go wrong with it, there is no official support so any security breaches, patching issues, instabilities, hardware failures or similar have no remediation - the singular thing that so much money would be paid for would simply never be delivered.
This is the risk of closed source software and black box hardware. They are a perfectly fine product category but are completely dependent on two things:
- Support from the rights-holding vendor, and...
- Confidence in the vendor.
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 is simply an anecdotal example of real world risks from the use of closed source and appliances playing out. It is often difficult or impossible to assess, as customers and certainly impractical, the financial health of a major corporation and customers buying Avaya a few months ago would have had little or no warning that their investment was to be at so much risk. Their only warning was that the product was closed to them and that third party support would essentially end along with primary vendor support ending as one is just an extension of the other.
Open source and open hardware products protect against this scenario. We do not have the same concerns about financial viability because support can be transfered to other vendors, products can be maintained without a vendor and products are open for us to maintain ourselves without the resources, permission or tools of a rights-holding vendor.
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Excellent points, and something you would hope more companies would take into consideration before investing in "black box" solutions.
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What is the condition of other traditional pbx vendors? Are they all in or near dire straits as well?
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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?
Didn't Avaya buy them all? I thought they were last big name legacy vendor around.
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Mitel looks like they still around.
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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?
