Who is going to buyout Avaya?

By now, the storm of Lou stepping down as CEO has passed over. Yet the question still remains. What is going to happen to Avaya that was bought over by SilverLake partners just over a year ago.

I have been hearing from different sources that top guys ( one was even close to Lou) are being let go and this would only mean that Avaya is going to be sold to the topmost bidder. Either as a whole entity or after splitting them into different entities.

Interestingly though, there are two names that are being floated as possible buyers. One is Cisco ( is there any deal in the world, where their name is not flouted?) and the other is very surprisingly Nuance. I can understand why Cisco’s name is prominent. The interim CEO who is taking over from Lou is none other than Charles Giancarlo, a prominent ex-Ciscoian. 

Nuance is trying to enter the PBX/ACD world to further stabilize their speech market and this would be a logical step. Microsoft and upto some extent IBM are developing Speech engines and the only way for Nuance to continue their stranglehold would be to enter the PBX sector as well.Nortel seemed a little interested a year ago, but with their current state of affairs would not be brave enough to venture in this.

One thing is sure. The face of Avaya would change in the next couple of months.

Contact Center gone wrong?

I had a broadband outage this weekend and I called up Bharti Airtel’s customer service. I was met with an IVR which calmly collected all my information. ( Account Number/Problem Description etc). I was pleasantly surprised that I was going to have my problem recorded by the IVR itself and I did not have to go to an agent.

My assumption was that the case would be recorded by the IVR and a complaint would be raised and an complaint id would be smsed to my mobile phone. I couldn’t be happier. That would save me time to talk to an agent. But then the worst happened. After the IVR collected all the details, I was asked to wait in queue to be transferred to an agent. I still thought it was fair enough; maybe the telcos need me to talk to the agent for auditing purposes.

So I wait and I am put on to an agent. The agent asks me the SAME questions the IVR asked. So I ask the agent, I just entered these details in the IVR, don’t you have a screen pop of these. And he says ‘No’. So what is the point of me spending my time on the IVR? So I register my complaint with the Agent on my broadband outage and also registered another complaint that their IVR/ACD integration sucked.

The good guys from Airtel called me the next day and wanted to know what the problem was. I started of asking whether they were employees from Airtel or just some bozo from an outsourced call center. I don’t want to be talking to another agent who has no clue what an IVR/ACD is. So he assures me that he is proficient on these and asked me again what the problem was.

I told how skewed his IVR application was ( Btw, my call was also dropped on the IVR 2-3 times when I was in the queue) and this is not the way an IVR needs to be written and surely not the way an ACD integrates with the IVR. I asked him what was the ACD/IVR they were using and he said Nortel. I asked him to inform his higher ups to move to better platforms Maybe Cisco

If you are an Airtel executive reading this post, make sure that the IVR applications are written well. If you want call completion on IVR to be maximised, atleast give us consumers a chance to complete it. I am never going to access your IVR for bill information. I will do it online. The only reason I will call into your IVR is for complaints, and since you already have menus for that, why can’t you integrate it properly?

I would be more than willing to help you if you get in touch with me.

It is about the Consumers, Stupid!!!

I was watching the India-Srilanka cricket match when there was an ad break. I normally would have switched channels, but the remote was not there with me and so had to watch the ads.

For the first time in my life, I actually saw an ad by Cisco touting its “Human Networks”. This got me thinking. Why in the world would a Networking company want to announce itself to the general consumers? Why would Cisco want to be consumer facing? Let’s say Cisco’s next big bet is on Unified Communication. Still, they would need to target the enterprises and not the end consumer.

They are not going IPO. So it cannot be a marketing ploy. Why would Cisco want to get into the public eye? I have some views. But I would like to hear yours , please.

Presenting at Proto.in 2008

Regular readers of my blog would know that I have the highest regard for Proto.in and the vision it stands for.  I have had the privilege of covering both the editions so far. In fact I have very fond memories of the first one. We captured the entire event on an N91 and that shot this blog to fame. That was the first time I saw the importance on video and understood why the Peter D. Csathy’s of the world have bet big on video.

And now I have been asked to be one of the speakers in this very event. Check out the other speakers and you would know why I am thrilled to be presenting. My session is on the Future of enterprise communication. Unified Communication would sure be a part of that. I would try to answer the question as to are there really any unified communications products in the market? Cisco changing its call manager to Unified Communication Manager, is that a marketing ploy or is it relaly a UC product?

VoIP ain’t UC!!! This is my pet peeve and I will touch upon that as well.I also plan to broach a subject which might be not be taken too kindly by my audience( product companies). Products don’t sell, solutions do. System integrators are the one who bring value to the platform. Applications on the platform drive sales. Your product is just a platform. When a company like Cisco focusses on business driven applications, you should know where the value lies. They made their network their platform. What will yours be?

This is just a sample of what I plan to talk about. Vijay calls me “controversial” but trust me , he ain’t seen nothing yet If you are planning to be at Proto.in, leave a note here and we will catch up.

Open IOS??

I can’t believe what I just read now. Is Cisco really serious about opening up IOS? Is Don Procter insane?

I think this is just a gimmick to counter the move of Juniper who went ahead and opened their OS. The main reason why I think they won’t do so is security. Internet infrastructure is too serious to be opened up to geeks who could bring down our systems. Serious questions will be raised by consumers.

What do you think?

Express Computers

I have been seeing the interest in my Cisco posts rise considerably over the months. They are one of the top read posts and though I don’t claim to be an expert in Cisco, I think I can say beyond reasonable doubt what they are trying to acheive in the UC space ( There was an interesting debate going around what UC is all about and is it really worth the hype. Will post about that at a later date)

Anyway, one of my readers who works for Express Computers mailed me giving a brief of Express Computers and I am posting it so that it would help people looking for Cisco gear at a good price.

Express Computer Systems is based out of Irvine, Ca and has been a used
networking hardware reseller since 1993.  For over 13 years they have provided hardware solutions to IT Managers, Universities, and Enterprise Companies worldwide specializing in the Used Cisco aftermarket carrying over 2 million  dollars of on-hand inventory.  Express Computers employs CCNA certified in-house technicians that  test every piece of equipment for sale.

Sounds good to me and if there is something you guys need, these guys might be able to help you.

Cisco can’t win on price!!!

I had a boss who used to boast that he has never lost a deal on price and I always used to wonder whether that was necessarily a good thing. And Cisco is facing that in the Indian markets currently.

I have reasonable knowledge of Cisco’s IP Telephony and IP Contact Center products ( purely at the voice layer and not data layer) and also on how low they can go on price after discounts. I have come across atleast two cases where our guys ( though we are primarily an contact center application development company, sometimes we do system integration as well) have quoted cisco solutions to small contact centers ( 10-15 agents) and even after discounts it is way higher than say an Avaya solution. They came back to me asking whether we can reduce it further and that is when I quoted the title of this post “Cisco can’t win on price”.

The next thing is then how do you convince customers to go for Cisco. Yes, Cisco is an infant in the Contact center space ( I will go a step further and say they are not exactly very mature when it comes to even IP Telephony namely IP PBX). But what is their selling point? I know what it is because I have felt the advantage but it is going to be very difficult to explain that to even the sales guy let alone the customer.

Last week, we were working on Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal (Cisco IVR based on VXML) and there was this unique problem where the VXML browser was not rendering media to the user even though the prompts were being queued at the browser level. Now my first logical thing would have been to suspect the browser ( which incidentally is the Voice gateway as well. Pretty neat stuff from Cisco; using their ingress gateway as VXML gateway) and probably even network congestion. After gazillion hours of work and even more cups of coffee, we finally figured that a database query through Webshere was taking a long time to return the resultset that caused this hogging. ( This might not be too clear a description. Feel free to leave a comment here if you are looking for further inputs on this issue).

The point I am trying to make here, applications and infrastructure are so inter-linked in the IP world that a problem in one can be manifested on the other. This is Cisco’s selling point. They control both. Avaya has no control on the data layer. Let’s say I had the same problem in Avaya IR or Avaya Voice Portal, the issue would have been tossed around between the infrastructure and the applications teams for months without any resolution. Cisco delivers one unified platform. Again good luck explaining this to your sales guy trying to meet his quartely numbers.

Fighting on price will decimate the market. It has happened to the IP PBX companies. We see a lot of them going belly up because of this. Cisco can’t and shouldn’t fight on price. They should fight on features, fight on unified applications, fight on unified management.

Giving it back

Innovations from Google and Cisco are not something new and if I were to write about every time these two innovated, I would be stuck to my keyboard almost every minute of my life.

But when Google and Cisco make an attempt to give back to society, I had to take time from my othersise busy schedule to write it. Google and Cisco are helping UN fight poverty. It makes you feel better that not everybody is chasing money all the time. Sometimes they do try to make the world a better place.

Will be back!!!

If things go according to plans, I should be back in India tomorrow (Tuesday) night. The trip was very succesful and will be a great one if I can get a great deal on a camera :).

The trip was a revelation for me in many ways and I hope to discuss them in future posts. Especially I have some very nice things to say about Cisco, their products and their support. Be tuned.

Nortel’s take on Cisco-Microsoft Partnership

Tehrani has posted Nortel’s Tony Rybczynski reaction on Microsoft-Cisco partnership. What it tells me is that Nortel is not concerned too much about the new found love between Cisco and Microsoft.

It stems from the fact that Steve Ballmer made it very clear that they were on the same page with Nortel and were natural partners. Must have something to do with talks about Microsoft making a bid at Nortel. I predict it’s not going to be too long till we see a formal bid by Microsoft to buy Nortel!!!