Signal to Noise

A follow-on to the white paper I wrote a few years ago (2004 or so), “Cisco Versus the World”, this piece attempts to explain why Cisco has risen to a seat of dominance in the UC telephony space, largely at Avaya’s expense, and what Avaya should do to remain a prominent player.

1. Cisco’s brand has a better reputation. The Cisco name means one thing: networking.  When your name is identified with your core competency more than any other name, it means you make good products, and have done so for a long time.  Avaya, on the other hand, has a name that is new since the late nineties or early 2000s, a name that was cooked up as a way of shaking the legacy image of Lucent/AT&T.  But, as the old saying goes, if you put crap in a pretty box with a bow, it’s still crap.   Of course we know that Avaya’s products aren’t crap, but, in hindsight, and setting aside trademark law for a moment, would it not have been better to stick with the name Lucent?

2. Cisco has a more qualified sales channel. Cisco’s resellers are data people, many of whom have also been supporting software applications for decades.  Avaya’s resellers are “phone guys”.  Two entirely different kinds of folks. Software people understand the needs of users.  Phone guys often don’t.  The reason is thus: software can be made to do whatever the user wants, however telephone systems, a la TDM, always had a rigid feature-set that didn’t evolve around innovative user ideas.  So Cisco resellers, having sold and supported software for a long time along Cisco’s gear, are often more experienced at tailoring solutions.

3. Cisco spends more on product placement than Avaya does on payroll.  OK, maybe not THAT much, but you get the picture. Everywhere you look, Cisco’s products are on the screen and in print.  If you were an alien from outer space watching American TV or movies for the first time, you would think that every phone in America was a Cisco 7970.

4. Cisco, with the Bells’ help, convinced the public that SIP is some kind of new, experimental, risky protocol. Of course, nothing could be less true.  But, since SIP holds the key to creating interoperability between all UC telephony platforms, Cisco has been in no hurry to hype it.  Not to mention all the licensing fees they’d be giving back if their customers began to abandon the Skinny protocol.  Avaya, now’s your chance.  Hype SIP’s scalability and global compatibility before Cisco grabs another 15% of your market share and converts those endpoints to SCCP.

5. Cisco has succeeded in defining the “standard features” of a VoIP phone setup. This despite the fact that those features aren’t all that different from a traditional TDM setup, and despite the fact that there are actually fewer features and less flexibility in CallManager than there is in Avaya’s solution.  Avaya, if you want to win this skirmish, open up your media server and let users create their own features–not by selling them expensive call-center add-ons (that would be Cisco’s approach), but by just including EVERY piece of call-center software in EVERY distribution.  You’ll be surprised how quickly customers flock to you.  Remember that you’re locking customers in to a 12 – 15 year platform investment.  If you GIVE them the flexibility and power that Cisco will only SELL them, they’ll come.