When Avaya was flirting with bankruptcy over 5 years ago, speculation from the startups was Avaya was lazy and didn’t innovate in the cloud and other wild BS. Ironically, Avaya did have some hope, but when they got the LBO treatment to the private equities in mid 2007, they did everything they could to prop up Avaya as if they were a larger than life company. Remember Avaya was debt-free so what was the purpose for a P/E Firm to screw them over?
1. i40 and i120 Integrated Branch Office. To most Avaya freaks, the control carriers looked no different than a G250 or a G350 router looking device. The system was a bit different than the G250 or 350 because on the inside it had a solid state storage and it was intended for VOIP use. It also had integrated voicemail and the system was comparable to say a Mitel/Intertel 5000 switch, small end, small scale, solid state switching. A big thing in this Integrated Branch Office was to use Session Initiation Protocol or SIP out of the box, whether it was an Avaya brand or even a Cisco. The licensing from what I researched was simpler.
It only lasted one or two releases before Avaya made a 3rd revision to what could be considered to be a Communication Micro-Manager system supporting digital sets, and then slowly creep Definity-grade code to the point by 2011 putting an End of Sale and End of Life because they basically trapped customers to go up to a Communication Manager or an IP Office as Avaya’s recommended “branch office solution”
2. Avaya being lukewarm to SIP I say this with respect, because at least Avaya could’ve gotten an audience in the smaller market. This is a major problem across any IT company, unless you make millions only then can a vendor take you seriously. (I am learning this the hard way in life.) Avaya did some DevConnect documentation explaining how a user could put an Avaya 4600 series IP phones on an Asterisk distribution (specifically the 46×0 series, the screen phones, the 4602, the 4610, the 4620 and the 4621 – modern day CallMasters) in a SIP firmware mode.
This was a huge thing for a company at the time, even when Avaya techs blogged about this in the late 2000s, it was actually attractive to people wanting telephony in their home. Again correlation means caution, coincidentally after the LBO, Avaya wasn’t so open about SIP outside of Avaya’s expensive systems – even for a 200-400 port setup. Some would consider that small end.
The 9600s are more compatible with an Asterisk class system because it’s ability to fetch to a server that mimic’s Avaya’s Session Manager subsystem; the only way one can do this. In general the SIP based 9600s can do a lot more in the SIP than say the 4600s. Even in Avaya’s own systems, the 4600 SIPs could only do so much, vs the 9600s. Take a look for yourself
3. The Infamous One-X Quick Edition. I mistakenly bought one of these on eBay in 2013, then later offered the NH Telephone Museum to buy it off. Ironically the 3 Avayas I had them take off my hands has never been seen in any of their exhibits! Not even the 8434DX which is the most culturally memorable enterprise deskset. Whateve’s. This system was one of two peer-to-peer SIP systems, or the phone systems without the box. Technologically speaking it’s hard to engineer this on your own, especially if you to page out on analogs or dial out on analogs.
It had Nortel ring tones, and this predated the Nortel merger by a few years! This was because the company Avaya bought out to build the One X Quick Edition was also the same company that also developed this same class of system to Aastra (that continued to make Nortel’s landline phones.) This system was marketed intentionally for small business customers, the system was marketed by companies like Best Buy for Business (that isn’t around anymore) – which was this close to consumers, even if it wasn’t going to be massively popular. Also Netgear made what was one of their only VOIP devices, on behalf of Avaya for that gateway to connect to analog devices. Again P/E firms didn’t see any “profit” so the One-X Quick Edition really didn’t see much light after 2008.
4. P/E Firms exit after bankruptcy and enters into a deal with RingCentral
You wonder why Avaya was so reluctant to the cloud… if it was by design or was it blocked by the P/E firms? My bet is on the latter, because coincidentally after they emerged from bankruptcy, they partner with Ring Central for most of their IP Office customers.
Since I am on the subject of Avaya, the option to have non IP devices are now gone. The long time signaling protocol for two or four wire digital sets is now dead. It’s unclear when the end was, but it had to be in the last year or so. So the last Digital deskphone Avaya marketed was the 9500 and 9400s, and the paper button phones, the 1400s.