Rough Start

[rjenk]

Looking like a rough start for our account as both our Account Rep and Sales Engineer were passed over by Avaya.  A little shocking as they were based in RTP at the main campus.  We had already had some discussions with Cisco and this will only accelerate things.  Unfortunately it will be a tough migration...we have been a voice customer with Northern for many years (81c, 61c, couple of 11c's, CS1K, etc.) and data since the pre-Bay days of Welfleet/SynOptics.  I guess it is time to modify our migration plans.

[Michael McNamara]

I believe everyone knew that there would be some job losses at Nortel. What vertical market are you in? I'm in the healthcare vertical and the initial feedback seems to indicate that the entire Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey sales team will be transitioned to Avaya. There are some verticals where Avaya and Nortel directly compete and will have redundancies, apparently healthcare isn't a vertical that Avaya competes in much these days.

With that said we will be issuing an order to Cisco for a Nexus 7000 network for a new managed data center, I'll be writing about that experience on my blog shortly.

Outside of that we're still taking a wait and see approach concerning Nortel and Avaya.

Cheers!

[rjenk]

Healthcare vertical as well which is what surprised me as there are several large facilities in the area (central and eastern N.C.) that are Nortel shops.

Unfortunately we are so heavily invested in Nortel voice and data it is cost prohibited to make wholesale changes.  We are over midway through a infrastructure upgrade (have about 90 5520's awaiting deployment) and have recently added a CS1K that we were going to migrate to from an 81c.  Before we completed the equipment purchase earlier in the year we stepped back and took a close look at Cisco with the idea of going ahead and starting with Cisco gear in place of the 5520's in the remaining areas awaiting upgrades.  What was so surprising was that even with the "aggressive" pricing that Cisco provided, their equipment was almost double the cost, not including support.

Please keep us up to date on your experience with Nexus as we were also looking at that option.

Sounds like we are very similar shops.