The Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES) customer has been concerned about the connection of the NES phones to Avaya’s IP Office (IPO). Problem solved. At last week’s “Think Big” event presented by Avaya, it was announced that the migration from NES products to Avaya IP Office was fully implemented in the release of IPO 7.0.
The advent of IP based telephone systems has almost always supported analog phones and devices like analog FAX and PC modems. The support of SIP phones has become very common. But what happens to the customer that has proprietary digital and/or IP phones from Nortel? The lack of support by Avaya has limited the sales of IP Office to these customers because of the high cost of replacing the proprietary Nortel phones. There are approximately 14 million Nortel users worldwide according to Avaya.
IPO 7.0 allows the NES customer with the Business Communications Manager (BCM) and Norstar phones to use their NES phones with IP Office. This preserves the customer’s original investment thereby saving 40% to 60% of the cost of implementing IPO with new phones. Release 7.0 of IPO now supports the 1100 and 1200 series IP phones that are supported by the BCM and the associated Key Expansion Modules using SIP. IPO also supports T7000 and M7000 series sets, Audio Conferencing Unit and Digital Mobility Solutions.
This support is in itself very important. But the process of configuring the IPO when all the information is located in the BCM can be difficult, time consuming and error prone. Avaya also announced and demonstrated the capability to automatically configure the IPO by connecting it to the BCM. The Avaya Data Migration Tool simplifies the process of transferring the configuration information and other data stored on the BCM. Phone extensions and voice mails are all transferred by cable from the BCM to IPO.
The demonstration of the Data Migration Tool by Dr. Alan Baratz SVP and President, Avaya Global Solutions, took a few minutes to accomplish. In large configurations, the transfers may take up to one hour according to Avaya. The Tool is not only an advantage to the customer; it also reduces the labor of the Avaya partner to complete the transfer. It appears that this process can eliminate any errors in the data migration between the two product lines.
The abilities to retain NES phones and support an automated transfer of information should stimulate the growth of IP Office. This will also change the proportion of Avaya product sales to Nortel sales eventually moving Nortel customers to an Avaya platform. Avaya announced that they have sold 200,000 IPO systems supporting 7 million users as of 2011.
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