This rumor still persists: that Mitel and Avaya will merge and create a company that will rival Cisco and Microsoft in the UC space.
Wall Street likes the idea of a Mitel-Avaya merger because they always like a merger. The bankers make bug commissions. Execs get bonuses. However, People get laid off. Synergies never happen. Integration is a disaster. And you end up with 1+1= 1.2
Mitel is already a mash-up of hardware and cloud with Mitel and Shoretel premise gear mixed with Mitel and Shoretel cloud UC services. This merger happened in September of 2017. Then 7 months later Searchlight Capital (which owns Rackspace) acquired Mitel. It must not be looking good from the inside to be considering a merger already.
Or it is very difficult to shift culture from a premise based company to a cloud services model. Make Bell-heads think like Net-Heads. Yeah, that is almost impossible.
Avaya just came out of BK (bankruptcy) at the end of 2017. They haven’t fixed anything. And certainly their user base is not certain how stable they are. A merger is just the latest move by the stakeholders to get out alive.
This merger doesn’t help anyone but financial stakeholders.
Partners, customers, employees all get shafted here.
The cultures don’t mesh for one thing. Shoretel and Mitel still are suffering from their own culture war.
It takes a lot to migrate to a cloud services company. Ask Cbeyond, Birch, TPX, Avaya, Mitel, Shoretel, Cisco, Dell, HPE. It takes a LONG time. It takes a culture change. It takes an employee shift and replacement. It takes marketing, strategy and execution.
None of that looks appealing and neither does this merger.
Either company may make the switch to cloud alone but neither will able to do that while undergoing a merger.
As Shai points out HERE, both companies have so many platforms and SKUs that it would be a huge mess.
