they had a similar model of licensing like they have now in R4 then they went away from that model because they sold less systems and had a lot of complaints. Now they tried it again and I guess not enough people complaint because we are all tired of it and it is now time to really milk the customers or drive the BP's to a different product.
I know that here in Canada there are so many BP's that they can easily scrap half of them because they are leftover Nortel dealers and the existing Avaya BP's can handle any volume on work coming in but they forget that the customer base is very loyal to Nortel and these dealers and they will lose out big time if they keep this sh!t up.
Avaya is easier to sell than an Asterisk based system (know that from inhouse) but customers do not take any change and increase in pricing just laying down, they shop around and there are other alternatives out there, Mitel has a decent system (apparently) and so have other manufacturers.
Andy mentioned Apple and they had the only alternative to Blackberry (if you call an iphone an alternative
![[rednose]](/data/assets/smilies/rednose.gif "[rednose] [rednose]")
) and other vendors followed and now their marketshare has dropped a lot. We can probably see Avaya going that route as well if they don't smarten up in the upper management and they get off their high horse and ask what the people want. They can also not ask %5 of high end customers what they would like to have but see what the masses want. You can't build this on a few large installs and neglect the hundreds or thousands of smaller ones in the hopes that they are dumb enough to just follow blindly because you have a brand name to show.
Feels like I repeat myself with this and hear other people say the same, us in the trenches with the customers trying to make the products work and enjoyable as well as lucrative for the customers and ourselves and Avaya up in the clouds all happy because they managed to squeeze a few more bucks out of us and the customers.
Rant end.
Joe W.
FHandw, ACSS (SME), ACIS (SME)
Give a tech a solution and he will be back tomorrow to ask you the next question, teach a tech how to read the manual and he will be able to solve the problems for a life time.
