Avaya is moving forward in 2012 with new leadership and integration plans for its networking business unit.
Now sitting at the helm of Avaya Networking is industry heavyweight Marc Randall, who is currently the divisions’ senior vice president and general manager.
Randall is tasked with the job of leading the division forward and carving out a place for Avaya in the fiercely competitive networking business. Having served as the CEO of Force10, now a Dell company, as well working for Cisco as the vice president and general manager of the Scalable Network Business Unit Randall is no stranger to networking. Randall told InternetNews.com that the goal is now to move away from a siloed vision of networking and instead move to an integrated focus with Avaya’s application and communications efforts. Avaya now has three core business units: networking, applications and platforms.
“We’ve taken the structure that we had at the past at Avaya, where there were seven independent business units and we’ve collapsed them into three large business units,” Randall said.” We’ve put together shared services across the business units that are solutions based.”
Other networking vendors including Cisco have been advocating for the transparent interconnection of lots of links (TRILL) standard as way to help virtualize and improve provisioning. Randall noted that different networking vendors each have their own respective version of TRILL, which makes it difficult for enterprises to understand or use. As opposed to TRILL, Randall stressed that SPB is a standard today.
“The difference between what we’re advocating is that once you go to an SPB architecture, you can run all of your existing Ethernet protocols unchanged at the edge,” Randall said. “It simplifies deployment, management and all the configurations that you need to do are done at the edge.”
Randall commented that a key challenge for him is to get the message of SPB out into the market as it’s something that is not yet widely understood outside of the existing Avaya customer base.
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Avaya Networking Gets New Leadership and Path Forward
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.