Two telecommunications companies, Avaya and Nortel, have established a partnership that will allow them to provide new software and telephone services to the customers left stranded with old systems in the wake of Nortel Networks’ disintegration in 2009.
The deal mostly affects customers using the Avaya Communications servers known as the CS-2100 and the SL-2100. For years, these customers have only been given limited updates to their services because Nortel was no longer providing such updates.
With the deal in place, customers will have the opportunity to take advantage of Genband’s advanced technology. There are already upgrades planned that will be offered to these customers.
This will be a major improvement upon the situation since Nortel’s departure from the telecommunications market. Since then, customers using servers based on Nortel’s technology could only receive customer service from Avaya. There were no upgrades and no new products offered to them, however.
That innovation vacuum will now be filled by Genband, which supplies software, hardware, and servers to telecommunications companies like Avaya. Some of the services that CS-2100 and SL-100 users will now have access to include VoIP on mobile phones, video collaborating, and instant messaging.
The first of these new capabilities will be rolled out early next year, in the first quarter of 2013. Avaya said that during that update, customers could expect to get upgraded VoIP, and that after that arrives, there will be a series of other new products and capabilities added as well.
The terms of the agreement between Avaya and Genband stipulate that Genband will become wholly responsible for both systems, the CS-2100 and the SL-100. These phone systems are typically utilized by major clients, with large, complicated phone systems and zero tolerance for downtime. Frequent users of the phone systems include hospitals, financial firms, and critical government departments.
For its part, Avaya will give Genband access to parts of its intellectual property. Spokesmen for the companies said that the result will be that Genband’s products will be more enterprise-enabled, which is Avaya’s strength, and that Avaya products will be more resistant to downtime, which is one of Genband’s specialties.
The companies doubt the integration of their respective code bases should cause any great difficulty or take more than a few months. The software used to run Genband and Avaya products is largely similar, and combining the two is only expected to require adding some small bits of proprietary code from each.

Jason Stephen Ali
Social Media Director
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