Avaya - Top 10 VoIP Leaders

Website: www.avaya.com

What makes it a fierce leader: The former business services unit of Lucent has been around for over a hundred years as part of the Western Electric/AT&T conglomerate. But once it left the comfort of Lucent, Avaya transformed itself into an IP based business communications provider and is now well positioned to capitalize on the much expected transformation in enterprise communications. Avaya plays in what it calls the Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) space, which it is quick to distinguish from Unified Communication's--or at least the version that Bill Gates is promoting. The Avaya vision is to integrate the communications side with the process and decision part of business so as to drive efficiency and shorter decision and execution cycles.

What to look for: Whatever marketing label it uses, Avaya recently went private as part of an $8.5 billion private equity buyout, so its managers no longer have to satisfy market demands for smoothed quarterly earnings. Instead the New Jersey headquartered company is now free to concentrate on creating real time networks for its impressive list of corporate clients, converging their traffic to IP backbones and pushing out the service providers domains--and saving a lot of money.