A good company ruined by going private
Pros
I spent 9 years at Avaya - when I joined it was a company at the top of its game. Good salaries, and ability to earn a reasonable bonus.
Cons
Then it all went wrong. It went into private ownership by an investment company that makes its money by cutting off the chaff and selling what it can. They put Kennedy in as CEO and the company has gone downhill year on year ever since, so bad was the performance they asked employees to take furlough (unpaid leave) then at the same time bought out bankrupt Nortel. (as well as paying Kennedy a huge bonus for saving money) All the Senior staff who took Nortel to bankruptcy were put into senior positions in Avaya – what a surprise what happed next. From that point on the company has rapidly declined – it was correctly sized – suddenly too many buildings, too many employees, duplicate product lines and a huge legacy of old Nortel kit to support. The story of buying huge market share of all the old Nortel Meridian installs failed to materialize - Enterporises were not going to be caught again. Straggling to move forward with an R&D spend drastically reduced, and has ended up with a product line that is now years behind the curve … voice has fallen way behind CISCO and contact centre totally lost to Genesys. Spending what little money they had developing Flair – when the world used iPads, then buying Scopia video conferencing … just too late again Avaya had already lost the video race at that time, as Cisco buying Tanderg killed that opportunity. The Gartner report even has them fallen out of the leaders quadrant – lowest ever position. With a debt of almost $6Bn that is an all time industry record, so high they cannot even make the payments – the company went into Bankruptcy. (Chapter 11) Kennedy still claiming all was well …. Finally they have replaced him as CEO ….. Chirico has been put in place, worryingly he advises he is keeping Kennedy as an adviser …… on what? … how to bankrupt a company. I hope for the employees that remain, that Chirico is his own man and does not follow the advice from Kennedy. What for the future, can UC and CC still be separate players – having tried to split and sell parts off (unsuccessfully) can they remain together. The product needs a huge overhaul, needs to get out of hardware, and focus on software, reliance on custom Linux servers is not the way the market has moved. Maybe it is too late to change.
