It might have got lost in all the Avaya-Nortel reporting last week, but we had a No Jitter post that may have as much to say about the future of enterprise communications as anything the rest of us wrote about the big acquisition. Tom Nolle wrote a piece called, “How Light is the End of the Tunnel for Enterprise Spending?” in which he suggested that buying paradigms and the resulting customer-vendor relationships may be undergoing a fundamental shift as we work our way through and (hopefully) out of the recession (Check out the post)

Specifically, when Tom surveyed his enterprise customer client base, he found that, “Almost half of enterprises think that at least one major vendor relationship will lose significance for them in the next two years, which is triple the normal level. Enterprises are seeing a whole new technology world out there, and they think their suppliers are missing that shift.”

One open question is what Avaya should do about Nortel’s data networking portfolio. If they’re going head-to-head with Cisco, that would suggest they should keep it and try to make these products a serious contender. But maybe the smarter move would be to sell off this business unit to help recoup some of the Nortel purchase price, and emphasize Avaya’s strategic partnership with HP, whose ProCurve line of products has gained traction as a lower-cost alternative to Cisco. This would also be one fewer organizational issue to deal with in the merger; unless the new, expanded Avaya is really going to put significant weight behind the Nortel data line, that product family could find itself neglected and further fading away.
Besides, is the data element so critical? Neither Microsoft nor IBM are coming to the Unified Communications market with data gear. Avaya’s gone the data route in the past with the Cajun switch products, and might be wiser to avoid treading that path again.

And what about Cisco? Does the Avaya-Nortel deal change what Cisco should be doing? I don’t think it will. To get where it is today in enterprise communications, Cisco’s strategy consisted primarily of leveraging its existing position in enterprise IT, and there’s no evidence that this strategy is flagging. In fact, Cisco is gaining market share in contact centers, where they had not been as strong–suggesting that the “can’t get fired for buying Cisco” mentality is not only alive and well, but spreading.

Can any old-timers out there tell me why the Hold button on digital phones was red in the first place? Red says Emergency; it says Panic; it says: This is the single most important key on the phone. Putting people on Hold, getting them the hell out of your ear, that was the most important thing? Or was it an artifact of the old-fashioned multi-line phones with a red hold button and a row of line buttons that lit up white? Where the important thing was not putting someone on hold, but being reminded that they were still there?
In today’s market, Microsoft has really benefitted from Cisco’s trailblazing, as well as from the passage of time.

Cisco really did have to convince the market that voice over IP could work (a task made even more difficult by the fact that, often, it didn’t). Now that VOIP technology (mostly) works and is (mostly) trusted by end users and telecom/IT managers, Microsoft can credibly make a case for doing things radically differently with your voice capabilities. Furthermore, in 2000, telephony at the desk phone was unquestionably still the most mission-critical communications medium; in 2009, it has dropped from that status for many users—those who communicate mostly by email, IM, social networking or mobile devices. So not only is Microsoft free to trash the desk phone, they—and every other vendor without an installed base—would be foolish not to.

In many ways, the public 3G/4G cellular marketplace is similar to the enterprise communications marketplace, in that multiple incompatible platforms are fighting for dominance, and users pick a horse to bet on: BlackBerry or iPhone or Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian. In the enterprise, you’re choosing among Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, etc. In both cases, you’re very unlikely to have all your users on a single platform, nor is there much prospect of real interoperability between the platforms, so ultimately you as the network manager are going to have to live with the incompatibility.

That’s a tough pill for enterprises to swallow, but it’s a pill they’ve been swallowing for years, so maybe it’s not the worst thing. The question is whether your users will be more productive if application development is more tightly controlled, or whether a more open development environment will bring a flourishing of enterprise applications, as it has stimulated iPhone development. And whether such a flourishing is key to innovation within the enterprise’s own business.