I read an article a few days ago that discussed whether the purchases of public companies by private investment funds that had recently taken place were still valid, given the collapse of the stock market. With such investments, the company is taken private so that it can be gradually restructured without unhelpful pressure from shareholders. It is brought back to market several years later and the investment fund will profit if the company’s value has increased. But if the stock market collapses some time after the purchase, it will likely be some considerable time before the investment has any chance of paying off.

Well, certainly, an ebbing tide will lower all boats, so the stock market crash is bound to cast a shadow on such deals. At the recent Avaya Analyst Conference there was some discussion of this, Avaya having been taken private about a year ago. Avaya maintained that it is in a stronger position than it would otherwise have been, since its funding was now assured for the medium term. Of course, Avaya was hardly likely to say anything else, but there is a rationale to support that view. Avaya is hell bent on transforming its business from being hardware based (sophisticated telephones and telephone systems) to being software based (unified comms and associated services). This switch is certainly likely to be disruptive to the business as the transition takes place, although, so far, it hasn’t damaged revenues in any visible way. Avaya’s annual revenues are pretty much the same as they were a year ago.

Avaya’s Progress

Since the last Avaya Conference I attended, Avaya has rationalized its product portfolio into two major groupings: Unified Communications and Call Center. Avaya is the market leader in Call Center technology and it remains a healthy business. It still gets healthy revenues from its aging telephone business and, technologically, it leads the market in Unified Comms, which is one of the reasons why I follow the company. It is too early to say whether it will dominate in this space, since it’s an early market but it’s currently the ony company with a genuine SIP platform.

Perhaps the most interesting time I spent at the conference was chewing the fat with Ravi Sethi, the President of Avaya Labs and an alumni of Bell Labs. He has some interesting projects running. Avaya has been testing video phone capability in the callcenter context in Asia and it seems, from their experience so far, that customers like to see the person that they’re talking to – but not all the time. Apparently what works best is if the caller can see the responder for about 15 seconds at the start of the call, after which it’s better to show just about anything else, and then terminate the call by switching back to a view of the responder.

The findings may be cultural, but I doubt it. It just seems to make sense to me. You focus on the person you’re talking to long enough to be comfortable with them, and then you focus on the topic of conversation and then you return to the person at the end of the call to say “goodbye”.

Mashed Up Interfaces

In case you’re not sure what I mean by a mashed up interface, it’s one like that’s provided by NetVibes or iGoogle, where you can assemble the interface from a set of widgets. Ravi discussed the whole interface issue with me in great depth. We traded ideas about what really constituted usability, but we both agreed on the fact that providing an interface that the user controls is going to be a part of the interfaces of the future.

I went along to the Labs section of the exhibition to take a look at what he’d been talking about. Avaya, like many other companies, takes the view that social networking is now an inextricable part of business and there was a mashed-up interface on show which allowed you to mix Avaya’s variety of communcations capabilities with Linked-In and Facebook.

This is the wave of the future. Linked-In and Facebook are not really web applications, they’re telecommunications applications and they’re here to stay.

SIP

I’ve been promising myself that I’d write a blog posting on SIP to try to explain why it’s so important in the communications world, and indeed I will, but not this side of Thanksgiving. A while ago Avaya bought a UK company called Ubiquity, because it had pretty much the only SIP platform out there. In the past year or so it has been integrating this into its Unified Comms technology and, from a technology perspective it’s now close to being ready for prime time. Avaya’s future depends, to a considerable extent, on how well this is received and how quickly large companies will adopt it.