Reshaping Enterprise Communications: A Tale of Two Companies

In my last few posts, I’ve described several factors which have encouraged communications solution providers to transition away from hardware and focus on software-based application solutions.

Let’s consider two companies and how they adjusted the path of their technical and business models to address these directions. Avaya is an example of a company whose solutions had a substantial amount of proprietary hardware around the time they split off from Lucent in the year 2000. Avaya had a leading market share in multiple markets targeted to enterprises, including PBXs, which provided telephone infrastructure for enterprises, and Call Centers, which used Avaya components to meet customer needs for highly scalable inbound and outbound communications. But the advent of IP-based technology and new protocols such as SIP began to change all of that. The mantra of IP-based communications was that voice was just another application that ran on an IP stack. This massive technical change was a major challenge for Avaya, since they’d built their business based on selling PBX and call center solutions based on their own hardware, but the cost of sustaining this business model was high. So starting around 2002, they executed a pivot to adjust to the new situation. First, they introduced new IP-based versions of their PBX technology ranging from IP phones to an IP-based PBX and a suite called IP Office for small to medium sized businesses. In parallel, they told potential partners that they wanted to move out of the hardware business and focus on value provided by their software. Third, they created a partner program, the Avaya DeveloperConnection program (later shortened to DevConnect), and encouraged partners to either build on or connect to Avaya solutions. As a result, Avaya was able to cultivate relationships with hardware appliance companies for products like media gateways and focus more on building out their application software. The DevConnect program also fit well with Avaya’s increased role as an integrator. Solutions for customers could be built using not only Avaya technology, but also DevConnect certified products. So Avaya had an approach to building out software-based solutions using IP, but they also had a large installed-base of hardware-based solutions, so they were not as nimble as some of their competitors.

The advent of SIP helped to encourage new market entrants into the communications software space. A prominent example was Microsoft. Starting around 2007, Microsoft introduced it’s new communication solution, Office Communication Server 2007 or OCS.  OCS used SIP as its backbone protocol and touted the ability for enterprises to eliminate the cost of a PBX and replace it by software running on Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) servers. Enterprises still needed to connect to the telephone networks run by service providers, which were heavily based on circuit-switched technologies, so Microsoft started its own partner and certification program to qualify 3rd party products such as media gateways. Microsoft also had a lot of marketing muscle, since their applications such as Microsoft Office were widely used within enterprises, so they had a ready audience among the information technology managers at customers. In 2010, Microsoft -re-branded their offer and called it Microsoft Lync. Microsoft quickly became a big player in the new Unified Communications market and began to take market share away from traditional PBX vendors such as Avaya. Microsoft also continued to be aggressive in cultivating relationships with 3rd party hardware partners, who added support for Lync compatible IP phones and newer IP-based products such as Session Border Controllers (SBCs). Microsoft has since re-branded Lync to be Skype for Business, but the underlying technology and business model is an evolution of Lync.

The market battle for leadership in communications for enterprises continues, but the momentum has shifted heavily to software-based solutions and most hardware components are provided by other vendors. One exception to this direction is Cisco. They have maintained a strong presence in the hardware side of communications by virtue of their leading market position in routers and have incorporated additional functions such as media gateways and SBCs upon their routers. However, Cisco also has built their own software-based Unified Communications suites and Contact Center solutions, so they use the software-based applications model, but pair it up with Cisco network components to create their solutions.

In summary, the advent of SIP is one of several factors which have radically changed the landscape for communications solutions. In this post, we’ve considered how Avaya and Microsoft built their business strategies based on the strong move to IP-based software solutions over the last decade. In my next post, I’ll talk about another important technology development, virtualization, which is in the process of re-shaping how both application software and communications infrastructure products are being developed and brought to market today.

If you participated in the evolution described here, please feel free to weigh in with your comments. If you’d like to explore strategies on how to evolve your application solutions or other communications products, you can reach me on LinkedIn.