IP PBX Featured Article

GENBAND Makes it Clear: No Change in IP PBX

By Steve Anderson
Contributing Writer

The recent news of Avaya (News - Alert)'s filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy likely left more than a few out there badly shaken. Perhaps sensing this, GENBAND quickly stepped in to fill the gap, making it clear that former Nortel Internet protocol private branch exchange (IP PBX (News - Alert)) customers would still continue to get support for products despite the Avaya restructuring.

Despite the restructuring, GENBAND made it clear, the GENBANDCare system of round-the-clock support was still operational and still delivering value for its current slate of customers. Since many firms were working with both GENBAND (News - Alert) and Avaya after the duo both acquired elements of the Nortel asset portfolio, including IP PBX elements, some likely believed that Avaya's changes might well have led to changes from GENBAND as well, a notion that GENBAND was quick to clarify. Since GENBAND has so many options for customers, it was worth stepping in to make that clarification to help keep current users in the fold.

GENBAND's executive vice president of global sales and marketing Patrick Joggerst commented, “Many of our enterprise customers own Nortel (News - Alert) PBXs, and we want to confirm that today's announcement will not affect any of their GENBAND services or GENBAND's R&D roadmap. As always, we are here to help our customers retain the value of their SL-100, CS 2100, AS 5300 or CS 1000 investments and transition to the real-time communications solutions that best empower and enable their business, either on premises or from our Kandy (News - Alert) Business Solutions cloud.”

This wasn't such an outlandish idea, either; GENBAND's Kandy Business Solutions—formerly known as Nuvia—incorporates a variety of systems, including IP PBX options as well as cloud PBX, unified communications (UC) clients, collaborations tools, session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking systems and more.  A loss here could have been disastrous. We're talking about some of the systems that run everyday operations, and losing access to support for several different communications systems could have crippled customer service, impacted the entire customer experience, damaged internal development processes and a host of other problems.

By stepping in to make it clear there would be no impact for current customers, GENBAND might well have stopped an exodus to the exits before it did any real damage to GENBAND's own operations. It might have lost a couple of early reactors, sure, but any losses are likely minimized, and GENBAND may even have reinforced why the current customers stick around, a welcome addition to any company's marketing efforts. GENBAND's reassurances now should prevent not only customer departure, but also help ensure that any word-of-mouth connected to this is largely positive.