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"... so many different management and config systems from ONE manufacturer."

To me, Avaya seems badly managed. The Avaya web site home page is topped with useless pictures. The Avaya Product page was apparently written by someone with no technical knowledge. There are useless photos at the bottom.

"... so many different management and config systems from ONE manufacturer."

To me, Avaya seems badly managed. The Avaya web site home page is topped with useless pictures. The Avaya Product page was apparently written by someone with no technical knowledge. There are useless photos at the bottom.

IANAL, however, the AT&T Intuity Audix Message Manager is a desktop product that gives you random access to your voice mail messages. The Message Manager user guide dated January 1995 is on the Avaya site at:

http://support.avaya.com/edoc/docs/intaudix/iammusr1.pdf

Go to page 25 "Listening to your messages" shows how to select any voice mail message displayed on your screen. This wasn't rocket science. I wasn't involved with that products development, but I don't recall any patents being issued for it. Even at the time it seemed like an obvious thing to do and should be to any practitioner in voice mail.

Large companies are very quickly picking up speed and moving towards SOA. Oracle is going to be left behind (read: incompatible, out of the market) if it doesn't catch up. BEA has an application server as well as an integrated JSR116 compatible SIP stack, so it seems to make sense to buy them and get behind them to push into the SOA market.

Also, it makes sense to take them before anyone else does, so they can integrate BEA WebLogic into it's application server and therefore lock other companies out of gaining an "easy" application server.

Another notable acquisition is Avaya's acquisition of a SIP server company called Ubiquity. This happened some time last year, so maybe Oracle have been watching the market and decided they have to play catch up.

My thoughts, are that everyone wants to take a piece out of the real time communications market, and taking WebLogic with it's SIP stack makes sense.

RedHat really have the potential to capitalise on this market, if they were interested - they own JBoss, and Tuscany seems to becoming a pretty good SOA project.

The key is the API. I have been using Google Apps for over 6 month now and its pretty cool. But there have been some outspoken critics about it.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4537

But it does definitely have the potential of shifting the market. The key for this is (on old Google tradition) the ability to integrate over the net. Big companies like Avaya will ad tremendous value to Google Apps.
http://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corporat e/pressroom/pressreleases/2007/pr-070222.htm

We are currently working on an open source "business application platform" (think salesforce.com). Its working right now with Google Apps but we are obviously thinking of integrating it with other open source products like OpenExchange etc... We are just doing our first beta. if you are interested let me know.
http://www.applicationexchange.com/

Outsourcing usually involves getting rid of entry level positions in a company. Look at the job ads today and the current "Junior" or "Entry level positions" in IT require years of experience just to be considered. It used to be that if you graduated college, you had a shot at the first rung in the company.

Now that there is no low level pool of workers in the company to promote, businesses are having a hell of a time finding people to hire for higher level positions. I was just looking at http://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corporat e/careers/careers.htm, a local branch. Every single one of their job ads required 5 to 8 years of experience in the specific job field. Almost every time I talk to someone about how hard it is to find good IT help, I tell them to grab someone from their internship program. Usually their response is "Oh, right, we should implement one of those."

And if all human beings are equally deserving of those opportunities, then you should be against outsourcing. Because those opportunities are no longer available in the host country.

Disclaimer: I develop enterprise applications -- both heavy-traffic web applications and middle tier business applications with web frontends -- so I know what I'm talking about.

oracle.com (J2EE):
Oracle's website runs on Oracle Portal on Oracle iAS, a J2EE server.

avaya.com (ASP.NET):
http://esearch.avaya.com/r/results.asp?SITE=com&qu erytext=blah
  1 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  2 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
  3 Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:24:24 GMT
  4 Content-Length: 45927
  5 Content-Type: text/html
  6 Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQCDDRQBQ=...

ibm.com (J2EE):
IBM's website runs on IBM Websphere Portal on IBM Websphere application server, a J2EE server.

sprint.com (J2EE):
http://www1.sprintpcs.com/explore/ExploreHome.jsp? refurl=uhp_personal_wireless
  1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  2 Server: Netscape-Enterprise/4.1

disney.com (ASP):
Last but most, if you actually request a disney.com page, you'll hit an Apache server that redirects you to disney.go.com, an IIS server. Observe:
Resolving www.disney.com... 199.181.132.250
Connecting to www.disney.com[199.181.132.250]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
  1 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  2 Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:32:01 GMT
  3 Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
  4 Location: http://disney.go.com/
  5 Content-Length: 229
  6 Connection: close
  7 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Location: http://disney.go.com/ [following]
--00:32:07-- http://disney.go.com/
                      => `index.html.1'
Resolving disney.go.com... 198.187.190.83, 198.187.189.83
Connecting to disney.go.com[198.187.190.83]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
  1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  2 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
  3 P3P: CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa IVAi IVDi CONi OUR SAMo OTRo BUS PHY ONL UNI PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA PRE"
  4 Connection: keep-alive
  5 Set-Cookie: SWID=...
  6 Cache-Expires: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:36:36 GMT
  7 Cache-Control: max-age=300
  8 Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:32:07 GMT
  9 Content-Type: text/html
10 Accept-Ranges: bytes
11 Last-Modified: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:31:36 GMT
12 ETag: "92eec6e1a195c51:936"
13 Content-Length: 8896

You'd be amazed to know how stupid you are.

The author failed to mention that the Avaya SNMP community string can be changed using the "SNMPSTRING" parameter. Even though the MIBS are read-only, SNMP access can also be restricted to administered IP addresses using the "SNMPADD" parameter in the phone configuration file. For more information see the following: http://support.avaya.com/elmodocs2/4600/233507_2_1 .pdf

How about Wayne Brady doing spots for Avaya?

I got the feeling that he didn't have a clue about what he was talking about.

Cisco hasn't been concentrating on producing telephony features for the past 50-100 years like many of the pbx manufacturers out there have been and it shows in their product. I suggest you look at the Avaya ip products and the Telrad ip products. Both can do more(and have more features) than the Cisco for a lower price.

Audix.

Avaya's "Intuity (TM) Audix (R) Multimedia Messaging Server". Popular office PBX & phone system.

Most Audix installations run SCO. Now they've got a Lunix version. The "INTUITY (TM) AUDIX (R) LX Multimedia Messaging Server". But my office runs SCO, and we never knew it.

Exactly I have a Wifi VOIP Handset that connects to my phone switch at work. All behind my firewall, bring on the spam if you dare.

BTW I highly reccomend it as the best cordless phone I've ever used. Excellent battery and reception (add a cisco AP and you are golden)
http://www1.avaya.com/enterprise/brochures/lb1875. pdf PDF

Voice over IP actually creates some particularly hairy security problems that traditional approaches really, really don't manage well. Some disclosure: I work for Avaya, one of the big vendors of large scale VoIP systems, though much more for the enterprise market than for anything to do with the public space (Vonage, Packet8, etc).

Lets start by looking at the wire protocols. We have two separate domains within which VoIP operates: Signaling, which determines where a call should route, and traffic, which is the actual stream of speech that needs to arrive at its destination in under a tenth of a second. These are very different protocols. Signaling was originally implemented using H.323, which can be basically thought of as a port of the existing telephony protocols (SS7) to IP.

H.323 is...well...not entertaining to work with. It's a very messy protocol. To a first level of approximation, H.323 is being reimplemented with SIP, which applies the semantics of HTTP to VoIP signaling. SIP is still complicated, but in a more manageable way.

Whether one is using H.323 or SIP to route calls, the actual traffic is moved over a relatively simple protocol entitled RTP. RTP basically involves chunking compressed audio into small packets, attaching a timestamp and a codec identifier, and throwing the packet at the appropriate host. UDP Port selection is managed dynamically by whatever signaling protocol is being used, meaning a firewall either needs to open the entire range of ports that VoIP might use (not small) or it needs to directly parse the signaling traffic to determine what ports to open.

Remember how both SIP and H.323 are both very complex protocols? Add in that complex protocols can hide many security vulnerabilities, and put that complexity in the firewall: Mistakes are made. (That's not theoretical -- a recent mass audit of H.323 exposed holes not merely in VoIP endpoints, but VoIP-aware firewalls. Microsoft, who actually has a pretty impressive firewall solution, was hit pretty bad.)

It's now that we can start discussing the differences between Enterprise VoIP and the kind of PSTN-Bridge VoIP that Vonage sells. Phones in enterprises receive connections from every other potential phone -- in other words, there's generally no central proxy that copies all the traffic towards where it needs to be. In the enterprise world, there's relatively few firewalls inside the corporate network, those that are deployed can be made VoIP aware, and the "central gatekeepers" really only manage directory services (go to this IP for this extension), conference-call mixing, and in the Avaya case, encryption keys.

You don't have that situation in the public realm. Firewalls -- which are everywhere, as deployed through NAT -- simply won't accept incoming connections from hosts that a backend client wasn't communicating with in the first place. But that's almost OK, because the only host a Vonage box needs to communicate with is Vonage itself. So if you actually examine the Motorola device that Vonage is presently deploying, you'll see that it itself accepts almost no incoming connectivity of any form that doesn't appear to come from Vonage itself (just DHCP and ARP, basically). The public providers basically proxy all traffic, because they have to: Nodes on the public PSTN network (normal phone lines) can't be told to just send IP packets at the Motorola device. So the proxying is basically mandatory.

It's ironic that, at least at the moment, PSTN integration carries with it an architecture that's infinitely more wiretap-friendly than what VoIP could eventually become. Tapping a complex mesh where any node often communicates with every other node is difficult-to-impossible to do, at least with any form of reliability. Create a finite number of junction points that must be passed through in order for connectivity to be established, however, and tapping becomes feasible.

AOL Instant Messenger is the most interesting va

Take a look at this presentation from Avaya (formerly the part of Lucent / AT&T that did all of the PBX/phones), they now have media encryption.

Avaya is a Lucent spin-off. So they may be claiming 2 customers where there's really only one :). Avaya sells interactive voice response units that are based on UnixWare. This is their old "CONVERSANT" line. Funny thing is, they have since replaced that line with new IVR units that run Solaris/Sparc.

For whatever reason, UnixWare was fairly popular as a base operating system for telephony apps. It's also used by other vendors for similar "appliance" type bundled solutions. Cyberguard, a pretty decent commercial firewall is also based on UnixWare.

The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?

We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya systems, 3 Aspect systems, 3 Periphonics IVR's, a Concerto Unison and Concerto Contact Pro product. Reliability and redudancy are huge for us, a big piece of our business is a 24x7 call center that handles 3 million inbound calls plus another million or two outbound calls a month.

Unix systems were a must!!! They simply don't have problems. They are the most reliable systems I have ever seen. Period.

However, this may be overkill for you. If you understand what you are looking for and do your homework you will be ok.

BTW -- Telecom is one of the easiest ways to cut costs and impress your boss.

...thanks to things like a VPN and Avaya IP Softphone

Holy shit. This was not the link to follow if you wanted a quick intro to the Avaya product line....

...thanks to things like a VPN and Avaya IP Softphone

Holy shit. This was not the link to follow if you wanted a quick intro to the Avaya product line....

This is soooo true. I have flex hours, I can work 6am-2pm, 2pm-10pm, or 9-5. I can work at home, or my office, thanks to things like a VPN and Avaya IP Softphone.

When your work load starts to be equal to that of 2 or 3 (or more!) head count, and you know that if you push yourself that you can do it... there are a few things that happen: 1) you realize that doing this work will save your job for the months to come so you do it, and 2) you realize that your boss doesn't really care if you sit in an office or the recliner in your home... as long as the work gets done the boss will be as happy as pig in shit.

There are still a bunch of applications that are only supported on Windows, especially if we're talking "portables". You can have a softphone (just like your office desk phone) on your handheld. Anyone with exchange and shared calendars also like to see their calendar available on the portable.

The big players in VOIP, mainly Avaya, Nortell, Alcatel, Cisco, to name a few all started out with H.323 phones. Avaya (formerly the huge division of AT&T that did PBXs) is moving towards SIP. Though others are already there. It's probably not too important yet as most installations are still traditional analog and digital phones. That fact makes the small pure SIP players, like Pingtel have a huge disadvantage in market share/mind share. The next generation of Microsoft's RTC servers will be a SIP solution (this comes in addition to version 5.0 of Messenger). And hey, if you just want a SIP soft client on your desktop, why don't you surf over and grab linephone.

What's happended to Bell Labs?

It got broken into a number of pieces, just as AT&T split up.

(is it somewhere in Lucent?)

The piece called Bell Labs did.

How about HP?

HP Labs still exists; whether they're doing less, or just doing stuff other than the commodity stuff HP's using more of, is another matter.

But, as has been noted, there are some research departments in big companies that are doing interesting stuff, such as IBM and even a favorite whipping boy on Slashdot. How pure the research of any given company is might be a different matter.

Shed their proprietary hardware and OS

Maintained 5 9's reliability

Tripled their call handling capability and dramatically increased the number of endpoints they could handle

In fact, with a single pair of low cost (compared to their old proprietary processors) S8700 Linux based servers, an Avaya IP PBX can handle more endpoints and calls per hour than eight (8!!!) of their competitors' NT based telephony servers, all while providing higher reliability on an OPEN infrastructure...

Shed their proprietary hardware and OS

Maintained 5 9's reliability

Tripled their call handling capability and dramatically increased the number of endpoints they could handle

In fact, with a single pair of low cost (compared to their old proprietary processors) S8700 Linux based servers, an Avaya IP PBX can handle more endpoints and calls per hour than eight (8!!!) of their competitors' NT based telephony servers, all while providing higher reliability on an OPEN infrastructure...

I dunno, but a quick search over at Ayava.com for Linux revealed an awful lot of hits.....

So it seems that your friend has not much idea about Avaya's products:
http://prodpubs.avaya.com/draft/chawkdoc/library/i ndex2.html

The Thus rebranding was in some ways rather good (ie it's a real word, rather than something made up and wanky like Avaya or Accenture, and it's short and difficult to spell).

Of course, their full name is 'letitbethus', which loses both of those qualities, and in either case, their name is only pronounceable in English and Greek, thereby limiting its usefulness in attacking European markets.

From prior Bell Labs ...

• www.research.avaya.com

• www.research.att.com AT&T

• www.bell-labs.com Lucent Technologies

And another unrelated Bell Labs with different mission;
at times major news agencies have mistakenly used their logo :-)

The biggest problem with IP Telephony isn't the hardware but a management issue. Most larger companies have seperate network and phone people (and they should) and you will get totally different responses depending on who is making the call on IP Telephony. Phone people will be concerned with latency and network people are concerned with bandwidth first.

To do it well on the corporate network you must support priority packet tagging all the way to the IP phones. This means using a supported layer 3 switch/router all the way through to insure QOS(quality of service) aka latency. There are non-Cisco layer 2 switches that have this capability. Cisco's solution is to over-provision your network. Paying for a bunch of aggregate Gigabit fiber lines is not my idea of cost effectiveness.