Nortel Avaya- It's Not a Done Deal

After a marathon auction, Avaya has agreed to buy Nortel's Enterprise business for $900M, much better than the original $475M. Great selling job, Nortel!

A while back I blogged:
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's VoIP market position globally." It's still so. Cisco watch out.
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's Contact Center market position with two leading portfolios and opportunities for cross opportunities." It's still so, but antitrust concerns in this area may delay the purchase, which is bad all around.
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's application and service business, which has been a strong emphasis of both entities." This is a huge opportunity, as it 's central to the new world of telecom.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's UC position, if they can rationalize their positioning with MSFT and IBM." I see this as a major challenge, as Avaya has not been a leader in this space.

"It's bad for R&D and support effectiveness since there's a lot of product overlap (five call servers just from Nortel)." This is a huge challenge going forward.
"It's bad for Nortel's Data business unless Silver Lake Partners (private equity owner of Avaya) brings together their Cabletron assets with Nortel's to bring back Bay Networks (or something along those lines)." There has been no indication that this will happen.

Finally, is it good for customers? Too early to tell. Certainly, Avaya needs to rapidly clarify their support plans for Nortel products given Verizon's concerns about national security concerns of the deal.

So it's over when it's over, and it's not over yet!

The sale has to be approved by various bodies (particularly addressing Verizon's concerns and antitrust issues).

Hopefully this will be done at lightening speed.

Any further delays (it's taken 9 months to get to this stage) will be painful all around.