The Good and Bad of Avaya-Nortel

Here's my view on the proposed sale of Nortel Enterprise to Avaya.

It's good for Avaya-Nortel's VoIP market position globally.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's Contact Center market position with two leading portfolios and opportunities for cross opportunities.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's application and service business, which has been a strong emphasis of both entities.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's UC position, if they can rationalize their positioning with MSFT and IBM.

It's bad for R&D and support effectiveness since there's a lot of product overlap (five call servers just from Nortel).
It's bad for Nortel's Data business unless Silverlake (private equity owner of Avaya) brings together their Cabletron assets with Nortel's to bring back Bay Networks (or something along those lines).
It's bad for creditors- a lowly US$475m is pttance for a business that generated $2.5B in sales a short time ago.
O yes, and it's bad for Cisco.

As for customers, we'll have to wait to see what the plan really is going forward.