Canadian Supreme Court Refuses Nortel Worker Case

Source: http://www.telecomreseller.com/

The CBC is reporting that the Supreme Court of Canada will not hear a case brought by former Nortel workers whose disability benefits were impacted ted by Nortels’ bankruptcy. Previously, the Ontario Supreme Court of Justice had set aside money for 360 employees on long-term disability. However, the allocation left most of these former workers with just 34% of their former benefits. Thirty-six employees dissented, but lost their case in a lower appeals court. Now the Canadian Supreme Court will not hear their case.

The dissenting group are also urging the federal government to introduce legislation that would prioritize disabled worker claims during a bankruptcy.

Avaya Files Registration Statement for Initial Public Offering

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – Avaya Holdings Corp. (Avaya), the parent company of Avaya Inc., today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of $1 billion of its common stock. Avaya expects to use the net proceeds it receives from the offering to, among other things, pay down certain long-term indebtedness.

The joint book-runners of the proposed offering will be Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Goldman, Sachs & Co., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital Inc., UBS Investment Bank and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

Copies of the preliminary prospectus for the offering, when available, may be obtained from any of the following: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, Second Floor, New York, NY 10014, or by e-mail: prospectus@morganstanley.com; Goldman, Sachs & Co., Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316 or by emailing prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com or J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, Telephone 866-803-9204.

About Avaya
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world.

Protect Your Nortel Investment and save up to 60%

Source:http://www.nortel-to-avaya.co.uk

Avaya's acquisition of Nortel in 2009 has resulted in the expected cancellation of BCM telephone systems in 2011, with migration into IP Office being the only stated way forward. As experienced IP Office dealers for 10 years, Telefonix Voice & Data are in a unique position to help you transition into IP Office with the minimum of fuss.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Security

Phone systems can and do go wrong; vendors may not like to admit this but issues do occur. As a company critically dependant on communication with the outside world through your phone system, the last situation that you want to be in is being out of support on an end of life telephone system, with no facility for spares, repairs, vendor issue support etc. This is why we recommend to users that you should be no more than 2 versions behind the latest software and absolutely not on end-of-life hardware.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Handsets

With handsets being typically between 40 and 60% of the value of your existing handset, the ability to re-use these and gradually upgrade your BCM system at a steady pace avoids the rip and replace scenario which will inevitably ensue once it is end of life and spares/repairs become completely unavailable and critical issues start to occur.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Training

All extensions will be converted with one click, including voicemails brought over, and your users will need no additional training. Your users will then start to become acquanted with the IP Office software at a gradual pace, giving you scope to enlarge or upgrade further to, for example, IP Office IP telephony, when the time suits you, rather than as a response to issues.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Data Migration Manager Tool

Avaya have developed a special centralised migration tool which transfers your handsets and voicemail over to IP Office 7.0. "Data Migration Manager". Using a three step process namely Extract, Convert and Apply, all announcements, greetings and voicemail messages can easily be transferred, resulting in a significant reduction in installation times and cost. The tool supports Norstar v7, BCM200/400/1000 R4, BCM50 R3/R5/R6 and BCM450 R1/R5/R6 as source system, and it is expected that the tool will evolve to handle the extraction, conversion and transfer of Auto-Attendant customer announcements in the future.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Wiring

If your business has traditional phone system wiring, you can continue using it with your Avaya IP Office solution. If you have a Local Area Network (LAN) to connect your PCs/servers, you can use that instead. Avaya IP Office works with either kind of wiring—the choice is yours and the savings of using existing wiring are significant. Common wiring interfaces available with Avaya IP Office reduce the re-wiring often associated with replacement of a communication system—making the upgrade fast and easy.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Growing

As your business grows, Avaya IP Office easily grows with you. There won’t be a need for another upgrade anytime soon. Avaya IP Office can handle hundreds of extensions.

How Your Nortel Upgrade Protects You: Gradual Replacement of Your BCM

• When you upgrade to Avaya IP Office, you can keep using your Nortel phones and replace them on an as needed basis.
• Or, make plans to equip select employees—executives, receptionists, sales and customer service reps, etc.—who can really benefit from the added features of the new IP phones.
• Either way, by being smart and managing the use of your existing phones you can protect up to 60 percent of your initial investment and still gain the benefits of a new solution.
• Get 0% financing. Take advantage of leasing options that make it unnecessary to pay any finance charges for up to 60 months.

Avaya Sets Plans to Go Public, Again

Private-Equity Owners Test Appetite for $1 Billion Offering

Avaya has commented and said "Avaya does not comment on rumors or speculation". However, we think this is bound to happen.

Here is the article from The Wall Street Journal:

Avaya Inc., a maker of phones and other telecommunications gear, plans to file for a $1 billion initial public offering as early as this week, according to people familiar with the matter, making it the latest technology company seeking to tap into a resurgent IPO market.

The offering for about 20% of Avaya, which was taken private by buyout firms Silver Lake and TPG Capital in 2007, could value it at $5 billion or more, the people said. The exact numbers—and indeed whether the private-equity firms can pull off the IPO—will depend on market sentiment at the time of the offering. Typically, there is a lag of two months or more between the filing of an IPO and its trading debut.

Back to Market: In 2000, Avaya executives celebrated the company's listing on the New York Stock Exchange. It was taken private in 2007.

Avaya's business has been buffeted by anemic corporate telecom spending and a weak global economy. In its fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Avaya had $5.1 billion in revenue, up 22% from the year before but little changed from 2003. Last year's revenue gain was mainly the result of an acquisition. The company reported a loss for the full year of $874 million.

In spite of the company's losses, Avaya's owners stand to do well on the IPO deal that's under discussion, according to a person familiar with the matter, though it is unclear how well. In buyout deals, private-equity firms typically only put up a third or less of the purchase price and borrow the remainder. So though Silver Lake and TPG paid about $8 billion for the business, most of that was borrowed and a chunk of the debt has since been repaid.

For buyout firms, opportunities to exit their investments had all but disappeared during the financial crisis and subsequent recession. They have been encouraged to test the public markets again in the past year as the economy recovers.

Meanwhile, a spate of tech companies have made plans to go public in recent months, a trend that has gathered steam following the eye-popping debut of professional-networking site LinkedIn Corp. last month. In what may be an even more hotly anticipated deal, Groupon Inc. last week filed for an IPO that could value the money-losing e-commerce company at more than $20 billion.

Avaya, however, is unlikely to drum up the same level of investor interest as today's Internet darlings; a better proxy for the company might be Freescale Semiconductor Holdings, the private-equity-owned chip maker that had a lackluster market debut late last month.

Either way, the tech frenzy has helped reignite an IPO market that was in the doldrums as a result of global financial and economic uncertainty. May was the most active month for U.S. IPOs this year, with 18—the largest crop since December, when 19 companies went public.

Basking Ridge, N.J.-based Avaya began as a part of AT&T Inc., then became part of AT&T spinoff Lucent Technologies. In 2000, Avaya was spun off by Lucent and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Avaya was later taken private by Silver Lake and TPG. It sells phones and other telecommunications gear to corporations. It also sells hardware and software used in the call centers that companies use to communicate with retail clients.

The lead underwriters for the offering, which at $1 billion would be the fourth-largest IPO of a U.S. company this year, according to Dealogic data, are Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Citigroup Inc., Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse Group are also among the banks planning to underwrite the offering.Avaya could draw the interest of an acquirer now that it is effectively in play, though that isn't likely, one of the people said.

Avaya isn't the only company of its kind eyeing an ownership change. Alcatel-Lucent, the Franco-American telecom equipment maker, is seeking a buyer for its corporate unit, which is likely worth more than $1 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. Alcatel-Lucent could also decide to take the division public, the people said.

All Good Things Must Come To An End. Avaya Announces The End Of Sale Of The Nortel BCM

By Dale Beech, Edited by Scott Camball

As we all know, the rate at which technology advances is often astronomical. One thing that remains consistent is the superior quality and reliability of the Nortel BCM telephone system. It has been said to be the best phone system of its time, and it took Nortel to number 1 in the worldwide market. But is enough enough? According to an old English Proverb “All good things must come to an end” and to that I’d say “Here’s to you Nortel. You deserve it!”

Last week, Avaya took the final steps towards terminating one of the largest telephony legacies that has ever existed “Nortel Meridian Norstar/BCM”.



Avaya International announced the end of sale for the BCM product line. This was not a shock or a surprise to the industry as rumors of this have been rampant since the unveiling of the Avaya roadmap back in 2010. This is merely the anticipated move.

However, this truly is the next page especially in the Canadian marketplace. Seeing that Nortel Meridian Norstar and BCM had what some people estimated as high as 80% of a Canadian telephone market and ten's of millions of headsets sold worldwide this truly is a defining moment in market.

It is not that Avaya left customers high and dry; Avaya has provided customers a strategy and a full migration path to Avaya IP office 7.0. Learn more about IPO 7.0.

When Avaya purchased Nortel in 2009, they announced shortly after the end of life of the Meridian Norstar products. However, customers did not seem to react that badly as customers had huge confidence in the Norstar system as well as the Norstar was such a stable platform, which very rarely broke down. With the BCM product line, that may be a different situation as the BCM is a more integrated solution delivering more than just a plain old phone system (pops) like the Meridian Norstar.

Let us breakdown this announcement and how it affects the customers

First, end of sale is not end of life yet! For the next 9 months, Avaya will still continue to sell the full BCM product lines.

March 1, 2012 the last day for the sale of systems excluding upgrades.

March 1, 2015 will be the last day for upgrades, expansion and any authorization codes

March 1, 2018 last day for Avaya support of the BCM product line


At Telecom Resource Corporation we’re proud to announce that we will continue to sell this great product until our stock depletes and of course we will continue to service and support our customers on all products indefinitely. At TRC we’re extremely proud of our customers and we’re dedicated to providing them with the best possible service and support for you and your company. We have plenty of vendors on hand and will continue to provide service and support for your system as long as you require.

Avaya & Nortel Phone Systems now support BlackBerry

RIM recently announced plans to make BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 available to more corporate phone systems and unified communications applications. BlackBerry MVS 5.1 with voice over Wi-Fi calling will be available this summer for Avaya Aura 6.1, Avaya CS1000 Communication Server, as well as legacy phone systems such as Avaya Communications Manager and Nortel Communication Server. It is currently available for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express version 6.1 or later. They are tailored to suit your PBX environment, so you can enjoy one caller ID, unified voice mail, and advanced security features for BlackBerry smartphones. This will unify desk phone features with BlackBerry smartphones and Wi-Fi networks to optimize costs and coverage, and make users more reachable.

Avaya’s strong market position with legacy Nortel systems, BlackBerry gains access to a huge market, while Avaya and Nortel users gain access to a great mobile application that gives them cost savings and enhances functionality.


BlackBerry MVS 5 is integrated directly into the BlackBerry smartphone client and supports calls over cellular or Wi-Fi networks with seamless handoff. A user can make or take a call over the office Wi-Fi network office, walk outside, get in the car and drive home, with the call automatically and completely seamlessly switched over to the cellular network and then back to a SOHO Wi-Fi network at home. BlackBerry MVS offers the convenience of single number reach and supports phone system features like hold, transfer and ad-hoc conferencing.” Calls are routed through the enterprise phone system, so least-cost routing offers savings on outbound long-distance and international roaming charges.

Watch the video

by Ray Horak, Technology Editor, Telecom Reseller. Edited By Scott Camball

Cisco and SAP Collaborate to Enhance Business Intelligence

Organisations demand as-they-happen insight into business operations to enable prompt reaction. The Cisco and SAP collaboration results in a globally connected, real-time, borderless enterprise that accelerates innovation.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – 31 May 2011 – Cisco and SAP today announced a collaboration to deliver optimised business intelligence solutions for enterprise, service provider and midmarket customers through SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) on the Cisco Unified Computing System™ server platform.

The relationship provides significant value to customers by giving them the power to gain instant insight into business operations while enabling them to react quickly to changing business conditions.

As consumer technologies proliferate along with virtual machines in the business environment, the volume, velocity and variety of data have increased. Access to such data is critical for business decision-making as well as market analysis. This announcement is a direct response to the need for real-time access to large volumes of transactional information.

SAP HANA is a multipurpose, data-source agnostic, in-memory appliance that forms the technology foundation for innovative applications. It handles business applications such as planning, forecasting, operational performance and simulation. SAP HANA's optimisation rides on the Cisco Unified Computing System, which substantially increases the memory footprint and improves the performance of and capacity for demanding virtualisation and large-data-set workloads.

"The age of business analytics is here. SAP Business Intelligence allows companies of all sizes to gain business insights by tapping into their operational data in real time, allowing company executives to analyse, decide, operate and adapt anytime, anywhere, on device, on demand and on premise," said Tim Moylan, President of Southeast Asia at SAP.

"The Cisco and SAP relationship results in a globally connected, real-time, borderless enterprise that accelerates innovation. Organisations demand as-they-happen insight into business operations to enable prompt reaction. The memory capacity of server systems plays an important role in ensuring the overall performance of business applications, and this collaboration between SAP and Cisco provides an intelligent blend of technical capabilities. Our mutual customers have found that optimised, responsive, and real-time analytics, in the changing market conditions of today, are required to keep their businesses agile and competitive," said Anne Abraham, managing director of Cisco in Malaysia at the Cisco Summit Malaysia 2011.

This innovative collaboration with SAP has been validated by the survey responses of information technology managers in the Cisco Connected Technology World Report: Part III, Data Centre, released in December 2010. About a third (32 percent) percent of the respondents indicated that improving agility and speed in deploying business applications will be their top priority for the data centre over the next three years, and 40 percent said that the increase in applications and data will most impact their data centre.

According to a Gartner report, the Asia Pacific business intelligence platform market is set to grow to US$819 million in 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of 11.4 percent. Malaysia will continue as the second-largest business intelligence market in the region, with an expected CAGR of 9.4 percent, to reach US$18.4 million by 2014, primarily due to the growing need for the nation to increase its competitiveness against other markets and to make incremental investments in infrastructure to attract foreign investment.¹

The Cisco Unified Computing System is the first fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access to a single converged system. Since it was introduced in 2009, the Cisco Unified Computing System has captured more than 40 world records in application performance. On April 5, 2011, Cisco announced the results for nine new world record industry benchmarks, highlighting the Cisco Unified Computing System's outstanding performance and productivity across data center workloads.

Cisco has more than 5,400 Cisco Unified Computing System customers spanning all industries and workloads with more than 340 channel partners across the globe who are trained and certified on the Cisco UCS B-Series.

SAP HANA is available in Malaysia through an ecosystem of partners and is timely given the strategic growth opportunities present in the business intelligence platform market in Asia Pacific and Malaysia.

Avaya Aura Contact Center: Discovering a New Course for Customer Care

By Guy Clinch | 21 May 2011

"As a dreamer of dreams and a travelin man
I have chalked up many a mile
read dozens of books about heroes and crooks
and I learned much from both of their styles,"
- Son of a Son of a Sailor by Jimmy Buffett

Avaya is redefining the tools used to navigate resources in the ongoing exploration of customer care with the Avaya Aura Contact Center. Avaya Aura Contact Center creates a completely new model for the matching of customers and their problems to the solutions within your organizations.

Before Avaya Aura Contact Center the maps of organizations were marked with isolated islands of resources. Customers navigated themselves across the seas between these islands in search of the buried treasure of answers to their problems. Often they sailed from port to port without sufficient navigational aids.

All too often important information, as if a valuable nautical chart blown overboard, was lost. Customers might be incessantly asked to repeat critical information leaving them feeling seasick.

The novel concepts of resource matching of Avaya Aura Contact Center changes this. Instead of the customer being required to navigate often rocky shoals, Avaya Aura Contact Center anchors the customer and their context. Resources necessary to solve the customer's problems, such as a customer service agent, are invited to join a collaborative conference. Like a ship alee of stormy winds, the customer and those who interact to solve their problem are immersed in a context rich environment. Critical data is not lost and no longer is the customer tossed by angry waves from resource to resource. Avaya Aura Contact Center brings the resources to the customer.

This subtle but significant change has enormous impacts.

Most importantly, the customer's context becomes persistent. Everything that the customer has done during the interaction, every resource that she has touched before seeking the assistance of a human being remains available to everyone who joins the conversation who has the right to see the information. Permissions and polices grant control over who sees what, sensitive information is protected, yet information appropriate to satisfying the customer is readily available to all who need it.

No longer is the customer required to do the work as if some ancient galley slave chained to an oar. Instead, the organization mobilizes around the requirements of the customer.

The organization benefits tremendously as well. No longer is customer context scattered throughout the organization like flotsam and jetsam. Expensive resources like recording can be centralized and contiguous customer records compiled without extensive data mining.

In the way that the world of navigation once dominated by the ancient mariner concept of dead reckoning has been transformed by the Global Positioning System (GPS), the Avaya Aura Contact Center puts concepts like Automatic Call Distribution and the inefficient routing of callers around the organization on the distant horizon.

The effects of this new paradigm may take time to absorb. The value to organizations that adapt it will require new thinking about how work is arranged in information-rich organizations.

Collaborate Anywhere: Getting Down to Business

By Wilson Korol | 1 Jun 2011

Those who read this blog regular know well my interest and passion for Avaya web.alive. The virtual world is a significant upgrade in collaboration, makes work more fun and productive. A virtual world is also many orders of magnitude more resource and energy efficient. Today, I am turning the blog over to a guest author, Joe Rigby, marketing director at MellaniuM Inc. MellaniuM is a virtual worlds design firm specializing in the Avaya Web.alive platform, and today Joe is writing about the work his firm is doing to create dynamic web.alive environments, both from the current world and from past time periods. With these environments, you are able to add a fun and engaging element to your web.alive experience.

A reminder, you can join me in web.alive for Avaya sustainability office hours at demo.avayalive.com every Thursday at 11 am EST.

Getting Down to Business
Joe Rigby, marketing director at MellaniuM Inc

With a feature set designed originally for the enterprise, web.alive is a web browser plug-in that integrates with your existing network, security and business applications to enhance communications, collaboration, and employee or consumer engagement. In this way, web.alive minimizes operational overhead, dramatically increases accessibility to your users, and delivers face-to-face interaction at the low cost of Web collaboration. Avaya web.alive represents the future of communications and offers the best of publicly and privately accessible immersive Web conferencing.

MellaniuM has leveraged this platform to produce unique and innovative environments scaled to up to 10 km. square containing high polygon modeling. These environments can be developed from both existing 3D mesh models compiled from any CAD software or geo-referenced terrain maps using the latest UAV scanning techniques. For example, it is entirely possible to create scaled replicas of long gone masterpieces of the Industrial Revolution or entire archaeological reconstructions or the lost civilizations of ancient Egypt. This customization means you can add a unique spin to your next meeting in web.alive.

Examples of MellaniuM environments include
The Titanic

The Temple of Horus

How does the design take place? Joe writes on his blog,

Now I know that most of you are waiting -- almost in rapture with anticipation -- for the soon-to-be-released timeline for the eventual introduction of the gridwide capability of the importation of meshes into the Second Life and OpenSim architectures. Web.alive is fully functional in this regard and 3D models with millions of polygons in almost any format can be recompiled and imported through the Web.alive editor. How does this impact in any way the potentialities of the Web.alive platform? To put it bluntly it makes all the difference in the virtual world.

At MellaniuM, we have taken their 3D Studio Max OBJ file format aerial scans -- with over 400,000 polygons -- and imported them into Web.alive. The geo-referenced Google Map image was combined with 320 scans of the 3D terrain scanned by the unmanned aerial vehicle utilized by PIX4D. We imported the textured model into Web.alive. As an attempt at proof of concept it was flawless. The entire dimensionally accurate replica of the mine can be visited by anyone on the planet to plan and designate resources or discuss the financial viability. The next step is to further extend the capability and develop higher resolution virtual replicas of everything and anything that can be commercially valuable.

SIX THINGS YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO IGNORE WHEN EVALUATING UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS SOLUTIONS

By: Polycom


To truly achieve your objectives for Unified Communications, you need to think about critical issues such as open versus proprietary, scalability, reliability and user experience. Unified Communications Best Implementation Practices includes insights and criteria to help you make the most informed decision to reduce operating costs and improve productivity for years to come.

See unified communications in action at the Unifying Moment microsite. Watch compelling video stories and download this informative eGuide.

Collaboration anytime, anywhere and on any device. Think about the possibilities.



Download this eGuide today.
It’s the first chapter in your owner’s manual for the future of business collaboration.