Avaya Keynote

Kevin Kennedy, President and CEO of Avaya gave his keynote shortly after the Cisco address. In stark contrast to the Cisco presentation, Mr. Kennedy proceeded to read the bullet points from the PowerPoint deck. Though somewhat informative, I doubt many people actually absorbed the message. Probably the best nugget was his mention of how enterprise is typically handling the decision whether to go CapEx or OpEx when communications are the focus. He correctly pointed out that those with cash on hand are making the CapEx decision where the expenditure is seen as a key driver of their business. Many others are willing to accept higher operational expense because they either don’t have the money available or may not be willing to go ‘all in’ until a trend develops. Certainly this viewpoint is understandable, as the pace of change in the communications space is daunting.