Avaya Fills Enterprise Hole With Carrier-Centric Acquisition

Avaya took a play from the carrier page book last Friday with its acquistion of Ubiquity Software, service provider supplier. The $144 million deal might sound like a move by Avaya into the world of carrier voice. In fact, the move is more likely aimed at filling a critical hole in Avaya's enterprise-oriented telephony offering.

Ubiquity, a British startup in part funded by serial entrepenuer Terry Mathews, earned June, approximately$23 million in 2006 selling a line of service provider-centric SIP server and signalingsystems. Ubiquity's archrival, DynamicSoft, was snapped up by Cisco in2004 for $55 million in cash.

So does the move indicate a change on Avaya's part to jump into the carrier space? Hardly. Even a brief overview of the company's financials shows how clearly targeted the company is at the enterprise.

"More likely, Avaya sees this as an opportunity to fill a hole in its enterprise offering. What Avaya lacks is acompelling service creation platform that allows enterprises to leverage theirIP PBX," IM-ed Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst of enterprise voiceand data practice at Infonetics Research. "It's easy to talk about'service creation platforms, but it's another thing to see what specific capabilities,features, applications etc. they deliver."

I think Matthias is ontosomething. Telephony vendors understand the importance of getting away from just selling voice. In the service and in the infrastructure, voice is quickly becoming a commodity, witness the emergence of Asterisk.The Avayas, Ciscos and Nortels of the world can shift the discussion towards one of value, not price, if they're able to differentiate their telephony platforms through a rich ecosystem of integrated, third-party applications. The result is a compelling competitive advantage not to mention higher customer retention. Service Oriented TelephonyArchitectures (SOTAs) are fundamental to that strategy precisely because the web services paradigm is becoming so familiar to application developers. There's no need to learn how to establish a call or read a presence record; the web service API shields the developer from those complications. Avaya offers a web services interfaces into its platform, but its SOTA is severely limited to traditional delivery points only. Presence information, for example, is not readily exposed.

Ubiquity's SIPApplication Server will provide Avaya with a richer, SIP-based development environment that can be adapted to the enterprise. In fact, the company already has sample enterprise products available today. Developers that I've spoken with who know Ubiquity's software think that adapting the platformto deliver other enterprise level services would be straight forward.