Now that Nortel and Avaya are together, all of the technicians are faced with learning the "other" companies equipment. We at New England Communications (like Avaya) need to make decisions on what to adopt and what to drop. The data side especially has a whole host of new gear for people coming from the Avaya side. New England Communications has used Juniper for the last year or so as the frontman on the network side, and they have a complete portfolio of switches, firewalls, SSL, and have even added a smattering of wireless lately. It remains to be seen (from my perspective) what we will adopt from the Nortel portfolio if anything.

It's pretty clear from the SMB roadmap that the IP Office will encapsulate the Nortel SMB features and hardware. Part of our learning will include what about the Nortel feature set the IP Office system was lacking and needs to be incorporated in.

Time to print off docs for that great bedtime reading!

Jay Tarbox
Convergence Specialist