AVAYA and CISCO in Cold War
By Mahesh PV

Corporate and professional rivalry between Avaya and CISCO has scaled new heights. Looks like they cannot even stand each other’s presence anymore (professionally speaking). And the brunt was borne by one of the largest and most prestigious exhibitions - Call Center Demo and Conference India (ccdci.in).   Avaya quietly left once competitor CISCO decided to sponsor the event.

As it happens, Avaya was a prime sponsor of this event. Until CISCO decided to step in as a sponsor as well. In the garb of ‘policy’ and ‘budgets’, Avaya withdrew from what was earlier confirmed sponsorship. This has left the Event Organizers in a spot since they have been promoting Avaya as their lead sponsors for over 3 months now, and Avaya may have gotten away with a lot of free publicity associated with a premium event. But the organizers do not want to get into any legal tangles and have resigned themselves to fate. Their Project Head Jeevan Kumar said “We do not wish to pursue this and leave the room open for future business with both Avaya and CISCO”. That is definitely a prudent business executive doing his balancing act. Yet, he did seem a bit disappointed. Both Avaya and CISCO are successful, well managed companies which are slowly but surely expanding to every corner of India.

When prodded, the organizers did not come out with an official response but did say that Avaya categorically stepped back given CISCO’s presence. There is an unsaid, unwritten and almost official policy at Avaya not to share sponsor space with CISCO. We tried to get comments both from Avaya and CISCO but as expected no one wished to comment and dismissed this issue as frivolous gossip and wishful rumor respectively. But try asking both these companies to come in as sponsors to a common event and find out that one will back out if the other is present.

Seems there is too much mis-communication (or almost lack of it) between the two communications giants!

Techgoss note:  The Frost and Sullivan report for the first quarter of 2008 showed that CISCO is now the market leader in Indian Enterprise Telephony Market.  CISCO had a market share of 22 percent while Avaya was 19 percent.  Nortel was in third position with 17 percent.  Once the figures were published, Avaya denied having shared its figures with Frost and Sullivan.

(By arrangement with BPONews)