Update: Avaya Clarifies Sections Of Product Road Map

Avaya briefed ChannelWeb in advance of the announcement for a Monday story describing products to be discontinued and what programs VARs could expect. An Avaya spokesperson contacted ChannelWeb Monday afternoon to clarify a few points.

Avaya will not end-of-sale the AS 5300 model application server, contrary to what Avaya Senior Vice President of Sales and President of Field Operations Todd Abbott told ChannelWeb last week. According to the Avaya spokesperson, Avaya will continue to sell the AS 5300 into government accounts and will be integrating it into Avaya Aura, the company's virtualized UC platform.

Avaya will, however, be discontinuing the MCS 5100 media conferencing server and Nortel Multimedia Conferencing. The spokesperson stated that Avaya has migration plans for both products and the current versions will reach end-of-sale status by the end of 2010.

As described in Monday's story, elements of Avaya's Contact Center Express will be worked into a future version of Nortel's CC 7, which will be Avaya's principal midmarket call center offering. The new version will be available within six months, however, not nine months as Avaya had previously said.

Finally, Avaya clarified its end-of-sale procedure for the to-be-discontinued products. They will continue to be sold for a full year and serviced for six years.

The launch of the product road map effectively opens a new chapter for Nortel's channel, which spent 2009 largely in turmoil following once-mighty Nortel's January 2009 bankruptcy filing. Avaya posted a stalking horse bid for Nortel's enterprise unit as early as July, and in September, won the unit with a bid of $900 million, plus $15 million for an employee retention program.

The integration of Nortel's channel comes as Avaya is attempting to turn over a new channel leaf. At its Americas Partner Conference in Nashville, Tenn., in October, Avaya executives stated that the Nortel channel would accelerate the vendor's goal to be at least 85 percent indirect sales by 2012.

At that time, Avaya also restructured its channel and launched a streamlined global program, Avaya Connect, designed to mitigate the direct/indirect sales force conflict that has dogged Avaya's channel in the past.

Avaya is scheduled to discuss the road map with media and analysts at 11 a.m. Eastern today.