Tag Archive for Nortel

| February 21, 2020
Comments Off on The Future for Avaya is Cloudy

The Future for Avaya is Cloudy

The Future for Avaya is CloudyBack in 2017 former telephony giant Avaya (AVYA) declared bankruptcy. Since then there has been a number of attempts to break up the firm. Extreme bought the Avaya network division in 2017. In 2019 there were rumors that Mitel was going to attempt a leveraged buyout of Avaya.

RingCentral will pay Avaya $500MEventually, Avaya made a deal with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) vendor RingCentral (RNG) to save its bacon. With the deal, RingCentral will pay Avaya $500M and will be Avaya’s exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions. The two firms announced the “strategic partnership” in October 2019.

It’s February 2020 and the Avaya – RingCentral collaboration will start to show some results – next quarter. The beleaguered vendor announced at its Avaya Engage love-fest that beginning March 31, that in the U.S. the unimaginatively named Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (ACO) will be identical in features to the product RingCentral sells today. The rest of the world will have to wait – because RingCentral UCaaS is only available in seven countries.

additional Avaya features will creep into the offering through 2020It is reported that a few additional Avaya features will creep into the offering through 2020. The first two are targeted for release this summer are bridged appearance, and call park and page. Bridged appearance lets two desk phones maintain separate and shared lines, a feature typically used between assistants and their bosses. With call park and page, when a person places a call on hold, the system will automatically send a page to another department or user to pick up the call. The feature is particularly useful to retailers.

Towards the end of 2020 or later, the vendor expects to deliver features that include line appearance, call appearance, hotdesking, and support for the venerable Avaya Audix voicemail service.

Initially, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral will only work with three models of Avaya’s J series desk phones: 139, 169, and 179. Avaya will work with RingCentral to certify B series conference room phones, L series headsets and the CU360 video conferencing system. However, most IP Office customers are likely using older devices, given that Avaya launched the J series only one year ago.

Avaya is also developing software to automate the process of migrating settings and users from its legacy gear to the cloud, although that tool won’t be available until later in 2020.

rb-

No Jitter points out that faced with the threat of its large installed base that goes back to legacy Nortel platforms, dumping Avaya – Avaya needed to do something.

To me this looks more like a win for RingCentral. For a relatively small investment ($500M on a market capitalization of $10.5B), RingCentral becomes the preferred UCaaS provider for the large Avaya installed base (100M+ seats) likely planning on a move to the cloud. Meanwhile, Avaya picks up a fully developed UCaaS to sell – if it can execute. Which has been its problem all along.

Can Avaya hold on long enough to develop the promised automation tools move complicated things like CMS to a cloud interface? – we will see.

Related article

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| December 7, 2018
Comments Off on IPv4 Update

IPv4 Update

IPv4 UpdateThe IPocalypse struck the United States in 2015 and three years later – nobody cares. The end of IPv4 was going to mean the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) takes over the world. Well, recent updates say IPv4 is still the dominant protocol on the Internet.

IPv4 number trading between private partiesIPv4 number trading between private parties has proved to be an effective means of extending the life of IPv4 by redistributing previously allocated IPv4 numbers. Trading between private parties is very active in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions. This has allowed IPv4 network operators to support and extend their IP networks with excess unused supply through the IPv4 market.

Janine Goodman, Vice President and co-founder of Avenue4 LLC., a Washington DC-based IPv4 broker and advisory firm posted a 2018 Q3 update on the IPv4 market for CircleID. In the update, the author noted that during Q3 of 2018 there is still a voracious appetite for IPv4 numbers – 18 million IPv4 numbers were transferred in the quarter. There were nearly 42 million IPv4 addresses changing hands in the 2018 year to date, a 160% jump compared to 2017

will not hit the 50% mark until sometime in 2020The article states that IPv6 adoption in the U.S. (based on Google user stats) fell after the beginning of the year and has yet to recover. Ms.Goodman cites predictive models which suggest that U.S. IPv6 adoption will not hit the 50% mark until sometime in 2020. Globally, IPv6 adoption has been slow, peaking at 21.5% during weekdays and 25% during weekends. The data from Avenue4 confirms that IPv4 continues to be the dominant Internet protocol.

For those firms purchasing IPv4 addresses, the most common IP block size is the /24 (256 addresses), followed by the /16 block (65,536 numbers). Nearly 90% of those /16 blocks were transferred to large block buyers. The /17 (32,768 addresses) and /18 (16,384 addresses) are also popular as large block buyers are increasingly willing to accept a collection of smaller non-contiguous ranges from sellers.

prices are being driven up by fierce competitionBlock prices will rise over the next 6-12 months. The article reports that most block sizes are north of $17.00 / number with larger blocks reaching and occasionally exceeding $20.00 / number. Avenue4 says fierce competition among large block buyers is driving unit prices up. Until this demand is met, pricing should continue to escalate. IPv4 prices were $11.25 / address when I first wrote about Microsoft’s purchase of Nortel’s IPv4 addresses in 2011.

rb-

The switch to IPv6 is being slowed by two factors. The first is network address translation (NAT) which has become better understood and implemented. The other is the evolution of the buying and selling of IPv4 addresses, led by firms like Avenue4 and IPv4 Brokers.

One of the knocks against moving to IPv6 is CAPEX and OPEX costs. But neither really holds water anymore. The data from Avenue4 says that firms are willing to pay over $1.3 million for a \16 block. Firms could leverage $1.3 million to update to IPv6.  IPv6 is fully built into modern operating systems and networking hardware. Buy the right devices during your regular update cycles.

Microsoft (MSFT) recently decided to embark on the tricky transition from IPv6 and IPv4 or ‘dual stack’ to IPv6-only, which Microsoft believes will solve its problems with IPv4 shortages and enable simpler network management.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| January 26, 2017
Comments Off on Avaya Goes Chapter 11

Avaya Goes Chapter 11

-Updated- 03-07-17 As predicted Avaya spun off its networking business. The lucky winner is Extreme. The presser from Extreme is here.

—

Avaya Goes Chapter 11In one of the worst-kept secrets in tech, Avaya has finally declared bankruptcy. The Santa Clara, CA-based communications company filed for chapter 11 protection on January 19th, 2017 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Reports are that Avaya faced an end of January deadline to reach agreements with creditors to address its $6.3 billion debt or potentially default.

Avaya logoThe company’s presser announcing the bankruptcy characterizes the decision to seek Chapter 11 as a necessary re-do on deals made a decade ago. The company was spun off from Lucent, a former AT&T unit, in 2000. Avaya went private in 2007 when private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group took over the firm for $8.2 billion. Avaya was set up as a leveraged buyout – loaded with debt. At the time the new owners said going private would help Avaya to accelerate product development. In 2009 Avaya scooped up the remnants of Nortel for $900m.

The Nortel acquisition added Ethernet switching and VoIP to Avaya’s portfolio. While the move added needed hardware to the Avaya portfolio the rest of the tech world started the shift towards software-as-a-service and the cloud. Avaya was not able to digest Nortel while taking on Cisco, Microsoft, and the cloud at the same time.

$6.3 billion debtAvaya was both late with VoIP and Unified Communications. Neither Microsoft nor Cisco were competitors in the TDM/PBX era. Cisco joined the race with VoIP and Microsoft then came along with Unified Communications. Both have tremendous enterprise penetration and brand recognition.

The pressure forced Avaya to consider selling its crown jewel, its contact center products to Genesys in 2016, in the hope it would raise some cash. When the deal with Genesys fell through, Avaya decided to file for bankruptcy. Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy said in a statement, “…chapter 11 is the best path forward at this time.”

In order to keep the lights on during the reorganization, the company has secured a $725 million loan underwritten by Citibank.

As part of its debt load, Avaya owes its pensioners $1.7 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. According to NoJitter Avaya will honor it obligations to maintain and continue the pension (as did GM in its reorganization).

Chapter 11 only impacts Avaya’s United States operations. In the rest of the world, the company is moving to assure customers and stakeholders that it’s business as usual.

Rb-
My experience is that the Avaya IP Office product is way over-priced, even in a bid environment. Why would anyone buy an Avaya Ethernet switch or access point when you can get a Cisco or an HP?

So what is to become of Avaya? One likely outcome is that all of the business units will be sold off to satisfy the creditors. The only thing left of Avaya will be a service organization to care for the huge installed base of orphaned Nortel and Avaya systems.

I know people are already getting calls from Cisco about replacing Avaya.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 7, 2014
Comments Off on Rockstars Team Up Against Google

Rockstars Team Up Against Google

Rockstars Team Up Against GoogleTo usurp Mark Twain, the reports of Nortel‘s demise are greatly exaggerated. GigaOm reports that the defunct Canadian telco giant has found an afterlife as part of a patent trolling operation that struck Android phone makers and is now targeting network and cable operators, including Google, with lawsuits in Texas and Delaware.

afterlife of a patent trolling operationJeff John Roberts writes that Nortel’s second act as the walking dead is taking place thanks to “Rockstar Consortium,” a group formed by Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Blackberry (BBRY), Sony (SNE), Ericsson AB (ERIC), EMC (EMC) and other Google (GOOG) rivals, which bought bankrupt Nortel’s patent portfolio in 2011 for $4.5 billion. (rb- I covered the sale of Nortel’s IP here)

“Nortel was the source of many of the most important innovations in history in the field of telecommunications and networking,” says a new Rockstar lawsuit filed in the seemingly pro-troll U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas that accuses Time Warner Cable (TWC) of violating six patents, including US Patent 6128649, which was issued in the year 2000 and describes a method to show multiple screens in a video conference the article summarizes.

Rockstar Consortium formed by Microsoft, Apple, Blackberry, Sony, Ericsson, EMC

The complaint doesn’t say how exactly Time Warner Cable is infringing the old Nortel patents, but only notes that “TWC operates, sells and offers to sell video, high-speed data and voice services over its broadband cable systems throughout the United States.” The author says Rockstar, which is suing through a subsidiary called Constellation, also complains that the cable company walked away from its licensing demands in 2012.

GigaOm notes a second lawsuit, filed in Delaware by Rockstar under the alias “Bockstar” makes a series of broad-based allegations against Cisco (CSCO) that claim the company is violating six other old Nortel patents, including this one from 1998, related to routers and switches.

costs are passed on to customersLike all patent trolling, the author says that has nothing to do with innovation, but it certainly will lead to higher cable bills as Time Warner will have to spend millions on lawyers to fight the suit or else pay expensive license fees for old patents from a dead company; either way, the costs are passed on to customers.

Joe Mullin of Ars Technica noted when Rockstar sued the phone companies, “it’s patent trolling gone corporate.” And there’s no sign of where this will stop. Apple and Microsoft are sitting on thousands of patents that date from an era when the Patent Office would grant a patent on nearly anything, and it looks like they’re going to use them to sue every industry they can think of.

dysfunctional US CongressThe totally dysfunctional US Congress tried to take on patent trolling but caved into lobbyists. Microsoft has already succeeded in stripping out a part of the law that would have made it easier to challenge bad patents. This means the best hope for a return to patent sanity may lie with the Supreme Court, which agreed to consider what type of software patents should be granted in the first place.

GigaOm cites CBC reports that Ottawa, Nortel’s hometown has been transformed from a one-time innovation hotbed into a tech necropolis where once-proud engineers are paid to pick apart other people’s inventions in search of new patent violations that they can pass on their American masters.

 rb-

I have covered the patent trolling mayhem in the mobile market for a while and this seems to be more of the same. Innovation is dead in the mobile market and the only way these firms can compete is in the courthouse.

In addition to their choice of venue in the pro-troll Texas court, further evidence that Microsoft and Apple have created a patent troll can be found in the fact that Rockstar has filed suit against the leading Android phone producers:

  1. Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) (#1 Android OEM in U.S. sales),
  2. LG Electronics (LGLD) (#2),
  3. ZTE (763) (#4),
  4. Huawei (002502) (#6) and
  5. HTC (2498) (#7).

In addition, DailyTech notes that Rockstar member Sony is a minor Android OEM.  If somehow Microsoft and Apple are able to troll other Android OEMs to death, Sony could see gains in market share, as the only OEM who doesn’t have to pay direct licensing fees to Microsoft/Apple (Sony also notably has preexisting licensing deals with Microsoft and Apple).

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 30, 2011
Comments Off on IPv4 Address Grey Market Emerges

IPv4 Address Grey Market Emerges

IPv4 Address Grey Market Emerges

The UK’s Register reports that depletion of the world’s IPv4 address space is spawning a new development in the Internet address space, IPv4 address trading. According to the Register, German Python developer Martin von Loewis launched a site called Tradipv4.com in March. The site is offering IPv4 addresses for $3 for v4 addresses in American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)  and $4 for those in the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) region.

TradeIPv4IPv4 address trading, however, is still a grey market idea now. FireceTelecom reports that to make sure that unmanaged address transfers don’t compromise network operations or security, the Internet Society (ISOC) said that buyers and sellers should make sure any “transfers be affected per appropriate Regional Internet Registry (RIR) processes.” Citing its own estimate of prices reaching $11 per address, ISOC said, “We strongly urge that such transfers be affected per appropriate RIR processes.” Unmanaged address transfers will undermine network operations, and it could raise security issues since anonymous address spaces can be spoofed according to ISOC.

On their FAQ page, Tradeip4.com says its auctions can cover both the sale and lease of addresses, subject to RIR policies. Some of these policies, the site notes, have grey areas. For example, APNIC policy aims to discourage address transfer by applying what amounts to a 12-month embargo on the originating party receiving new addresses. However, Tradeip4.com dismisses this as irrelevant, since APNIC’s space is exhausted and no new blocks are being assigned according to FierceTelecom. Despite these concerns, Tradeip4.com, maintains that it can sell and lease IPv4 addresses and maintains that it follows RIR policies.

Internet SocietyThis is not just an SMB issue Microsoft (MSFT), recently bought Nortel’s IPv4 addresses (Which I wrote about here). Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist for network security vendor Arbor Networks, told FierceTelecom that Nortel’s deal with Microsoft reflects how IPv4 depletion is becoming a more pressing issue, now that IPv4 is a scarce resource.

IPv4 addresses have not been a scarce resource and no one has had to pay more, but what really is starting to change is Microsoft spending money to buy Nortel’s IPv4 address space.  For the first time, there’s now a price associated with V4, and one you have a price you start having providers charge for it and start seeing people having a reason to care.

The Register article notes that the Canadian government, via its Industry Canada department, is also against the trade of IPv4 addresses, and it has weighed in on the sale of Nortel’s addresses to Microsoft. In a letter discussed on CircleID, Industry Canada expressed its support for the long-standing position that addresses are not property and therefore cannot be traded.

rb-

I see several problems with the  IPv4 grey market. Trading in IPv4 is just another sign of resistance to IPv6. Firms with a global view have to realize that the reallocation of a handful of IPv4 will not make a difference in an IPv6 world. Another issue could be the routability of an IPv4 address originally assigned to APIC and traded on the grey market to RIPE. Right now there is no guarantee that these types of addresses will be recognized. There are also political issues, the Canadian government opposes the IP grey market. Industry Canada has expressed its support for the long-standing position that addresses are not property and therefore cannot be traded.

The ISOC says IPv4 addresses are worth $11.00, MSFT paid $11.25 and ARIN addresses are now (04-30-11) trading $7.00 per IP. on tradeipv4.com so MSFT appears to have overpaid for the Nortel address range. The bigger issue is the change in the nature of an IP address.

What do you think?

Are grey market IPv4 addresses worth it?

Has your firm started its transition to IPv6?

Related articles

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries