It's now official - the Nortel/Avaya deal has closed. As of today, Avaya has expanded its portfolio, enlarged its customer base and broadened its global reach. I think Kevin Kennedy's quote best summarizes the benefits that Nortel brings to Avaya:

"By combining our complementary technology portfolios, deep industry specific domain expertise, sales channels and customer bases, the new Avaya will redefine business communications and help customers to reduce costs, simplify operations and increase their business agility." In other words, the deal makes both organizations and their customers exponentially better off. Read the full Avaya press release here.

See what Avaya has to say about the status of the deal and the value it places on Nortel's people, technology and customer base by watching this short video clip. You'll hear Mohamad Ali, Avaya's Senior Vice President of Corporate Development talk about the acquisition, why Avaya was willing to "go the distance" during the auction and how the Nortel and Avaya teams are working extensively to ensure that the new organization will be operational from day one.

Avaya today announced that the Canadian Minister of Industry has approved the company's acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions under the Investment Canada Act. As this was basically the last major regulatory hurdle to pass, the deal has made yet another significant step toward closing, which is expected to occur later this month. To learn more, read the press release here.

For more information on what's next for Nortel Enterprise Solutions, check out the microsite.

As I mentioned earlier this week, we held a webcast yesterday to provide more info on Nortel's Enterprise solutions including an overview on the planned Avaya acquisition. I guess it's not too surprising, given all the buzz around the Avaya deal, but the webcast shattered Nortel's record for the highest number of attendees for an online webinar event with over 2300 participants.

In case you missed it, the archived version is now available here.

Highlights from the event include:

Ok, ok, i know it's been several months since we've posted an update to this blog. In our defense, we've had a lot going on with the Avaya deal. That said, we're trying to get back up to speed in providng content on Enterprise events, technology, news - and of course - the planned sale of Nortel's Enterprise biz to Avaya.

So, to provide a few more typing fingers, Matt Oshida and I are joinning Phil Edholm as contributors to Enterprise Technology - watch for new content coming very soon...

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was sensory interfaces, but we focused on audio. In this post we will focus on the visual aspects, specifically real time video.

I wanted to put in a quick post to let everyone who follows this blog know that the Nortel Technical Journalfor for thefirst half 2009 has been released and is on-line. That is right, it is ON-LINE only...with the Nortel focus to being a green supplier and a investing in protecting the environment we made the decision to transform the NTJ into an on-line magazine that we will update every 6 months or so. This issue has articles about the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Network, Innovation both inside the company and with the custoemr, and critical wireless technology.

Please chech out the 1st Half 2009 Nortel Technical Journal HERE

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the control plane. This post is focused to the Sensory Interfaces that can be used by people when communicating. Sensory interfaces are the mechanisms that we can use for communicating. Essentially, as human beings, we have 5 sensory inputs mechanisms; hearing, seeing, touch, smell, and taste. While smell and taste may have some value in certain social forms of communications I will argue they are of minimal value in business oriented communications and the need to replicate them over distance is not justifiable to the cost. Therefore, we have essentially 3 primary forms for business; audio, visual and physical.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the transport. In this post the topic is the control plane level. The control plane is the dimension responsible for managing the establishment of connections between communicating entities. It started as call control in the PBX arena where it maintained the call state of devices and instructed the TDM switching plane to connect two devices (or a device and a trunk) together.

In the previous postI introduced the concept of a layer (or partitioned model)of the functions of communications. in this and the next few posts I intended to discuss the different areas in more detail. The model is shown below, in this post I will focus on the transport level. In each subsequent post I will take a single level and discuss the transformations in that area that are coming in the future.

The transport dimension has obviously been the place where the large transformation has occurred over the last 5 years as the transport migrated from traditional TDM infrastructure to an IP based infrastructure. This transformation, while having significant potential cost impact, has had little if any real impact on the function of communications.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with my team to define the dimensions of communications going forward and I thought it would be interesting to share on the blog. This will be a multiple post as I go through the dimensions and then discuss some of the research that we are driving in the dimensions. Over the next few blogs I will discuss in more detail each of the areas, but this was intended to be an outline.

The following chart is a structure of the dimensions of communications.