Signal to Noise

The Microsoft still dominates microcomputing and has made substantial gains in the areas of mobile computing, vis a vis Windows Mobile. Microsoft’s core technologies haven’t improved in any revolutionary way, but their rough edges have been somewhat smoothed by industry pressure (ie. ActiveX wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; .Net replaced clunky, inconsistent runtime environments, and YES, Windows HAS gotten better).

There has been a lot of chatter about Microsoft’s entry into the software-based PBX arena. And while I haven’t gotten my mitts on any of Microsoft’s telephony goods, I’m glad they’re going the SIP route. Cisco has been latent in embracing SIP and still doesn’t support it with CallManager to my liking. So, when the “some future date” for the release of MS’s PBX occurs, the ante on Cisco will have been upped.

But to me the real competitive squeeze in the enterprise space won’t be on Cisco, but rather on Avaya, who’s been the number one or two bizVoIP player trading the top spot back and forth with Cisco  for the last several years.

And the reason Avaya should fear Microsoft is that Avaya’s product lines are marketed on the base of empirical information about capacity. This is the cornerstone of Avaya’s sales pitch and has been for a long time. “We’re the only PBX that can handle a zillion trillion connected calls per month bla bla bla.” I’ve sat through many, many Avaya sales pitches. They’re always the same formula, regardless of reseller or client. Numbers, numbers, numbers.
The most recent pitch was delivered by some folks from Cincinatti Bell, who (in keeping with the formula) brought along a very well-informed but insensitive Avaya employee–a sales support engineer. He did a slideshow with 36 slides which were mostly bragging about the technical stress limits of Avaya gateways and servers. This isn’t how you sell into the boardroom. This is how you sell into the back room. And that’s why Cisco’s been nailing Avaya in greenfield deals for the last several years. Folks that buy Avaya are folks that are afraid of Cisco because there aren’t any TDM endpoints, so Avaya makes them feel more secure.  So, basically, FUD.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather implement an Avaya build-out any day of the week than a CallManager, but Avaya should learn that you can’t sell telephony solutions in the same fashion that worked for Lucent and AT&T in the 80s and 90s. It’s a different world now. Case in point: What rocket scientist decided to name Avaya’s mobile call-bridging feature “EC500″? What the heck does that mean? It’s not even catchy. It sounds like the name of a student film by George Lucas. Why not call it “mobile extension” or “reachability” or something that at least carries some meaning?

Cisco’s already figured these lessons out, and Microsoft’s been watching in the wings while everybody else learns the tough lessons. How very Microsoft-like. So here comes the pounce.

Selling Microsoft versus Avaya is going to be like selling Microsoft versus Novell. Remember that? I’m actually looking at my CNE hanging on the wall of my basement office. Got it in 1996, just before Novell became irrelevant. We can thank Microsoft for ridding us of Novell’s overly-technical ego, obsession with capacity which was a non-issue to most customers anyway, and for making us understand that homogeny, while not the purest of ideals, is often the approach that yields the least headaches. These are the lessons Avaya needs to cram for in a hurry (and Nortel too) if they want to survive.

Cisco–no worries. They’re already there.