OTG Consulting

by Jeffrey Pearl   -   October 5, 2019

It’s the end of an era and no surprise to those in the mix. Avaya has announced it is pushing all of the customers moving to the cloud, which is most, to Ring Central! Another step towards “The Death of the PSTN”

Ring Central! Look I have nothing against them I have a great relationship with Ring Central and all the 100 other VoIP Service providers. Ironically, Ring Central is one of Avaya’s largest competitors. I knew Avaya would not survive after  their bankruptcy, but, I’m amazed and excited that this is so public so fast! Amazed, because this will really stir up the hornets nest! What I mean by that, this announcement is like whacking the side of the Hornet’s Nest with you Big Bertha driver. The Hornets nest is, in this analogy, the base of customers that still have premised based phone systems. When you whack a hornets nest, they all come out to see what the heck is going on, and they are usually mad. The hornets in this analogy are all the customers.

When all the customers catch this news, and want to move to the cloud, they will, by design to take bids from Avaya/Ring Central. IT DOES NOT STOP THERE! Any responsible executive will not take just one bid. I’m sure most people in business understand you don’t go get one bid on anything of importance. Voice communications are on top of the “importance list” to survive in business, right under oxygen in the office! So when an IT or OPS person brings the proposal from Avaya/Ring Central to their boss, he or she will say “Who else did you look at?’. You wouldn’t fork lift your phone system, which is real easy today and we get to put brand new state of the art phones on everyone's desk for $0, it’s all baked into the service from Ring and all their 100 plus competitors.

This is the exciting part, because it accelerates the industry’s push to the cloud, lots have made the conversion, but, there are many that have remained loyal to Avaya and other premise based systems.  Either they don’t know, the PSTN is getting shut down or are unaware of all the  very cool features and ease of use with the Hosted VoIP Service providers or they just say “it ain’t broke” until they get hacked, like I just witnessed last week, or the system or a portion  of it, just quits and they find out it’s no longer supported. I’ve seen this up close and personal more times than I can count!

So All in All, I applaud Avaya for finally admitting to themselves, their employees, and their customers, that there are easier and better options out there. I have been joking with PBX or Prem based sales guys for years asking “how do you live with yourselves? Selling someone a phone system hooked to the PSTN. You know both those things are so antiquated!” Well when Nortel went away, then Toshiba, then Avaya went bankrupt, I thought that would’ve been enough, but lots of people still have Avaya phones systems. I get it, it was all ATT and that’s all we had, for years!  Then came real competition and it’s been “a melting ice cube” ever since. I do think Avaya announcing this on top of every carrier working hard to shut down the PSTN, will be the final catalyst to really speed things up! This new technology is great and makes EVERYONE’S life so much easier.

Jeffrey Pearl is the CEO and Managing Partner of OTG Consulting and has over 3 decades of upper management experience in Telecommunications and IT.