The leadership will probably never admit that they are largely to blame for the current state of the company. If one were to list all the mistakes the leadership has made so far, I think it would be a very long list.
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Creating the International Leadership Team was the worst thing Avaya has done for the International business. But, Alan seems supportive of retaining and promoting this team.
Truely said, this debt restructuring drama should not continue anymore...Start firing old leadership in a systematic manner. Simple way to identify to check the stategy execution status, not achieved then fire without second thought. All people manager roles are redundant, why we are keeping those useless roles,who are only contributing towards running bureaucracy
Alan did pointed out 75% old & 25% ratio of employees theory.
75% must be aligned to run the beaureaucracy program, rest 25% new one may never will have any clue whats happening within the orgsnization, as 75% are power & control of the org.
So its ok to think about planned liquidation after 22 yrs as a failed company, where no one is willing to buyout.
Go for liquudation, can't end bureaucracy,out of hands now
And it has started again, old SMG,DIR have initiated the protocol, internal operations teams have stopped working, going on leave, not attentively working or started providing poor support to our customers, thats how operations beaureaucracy prevails. Such a shameful leaders org it has become. AVAYA HR, Compliance, Administration & even Alan is part and well aware of it.
Better to liquidate this company earlier now , then to have same result after debt restructuring few years later. This step now will be good for its current employees & debtors. As old leadership which constitutes of 80% of the company will never let it out of the current state.
Go for lquiditation
Worst leadership mistakes? Turning up for work! Never seen such a useless, money grabbing, feckless bunch of thieves on one board before!!
Allan has his work cut out trying to build something out of this rubble, but really needs to clear the entire board to start with - anyone who sat through the failures and disasters and yet took their salary are thieves and need to go.
Avaya acquired the Nortel enterprise business which had already taken its X11 PBX software and working with Microsoft and IBM had a fully functional hosted PBX with its SCS platform back in 2006/07. Nortel also partnered with SIP Foundry for deploying SIP endpoints. Avaya had the technology in hand and did nothing with it and today is paying the price. They missed the window.
Violating sanctions-Avaya is STILL doing business in Russia.
That's not even a leadership mistake. That is an act of EVIL.
Bringing to market, complex, horizontally integrated, overlapping product lines for years. e.g. Elite Multichannel, Audix, Octel, Modular Messages, Comm Mgr Messaging, Aura Messaging, AACC, Control Manager, CEBP/EDP/Breeze, Oceana, IQ, Spaces, Rebaged Verint, Aurix, KnoahSoft, ZangOffice (Esna) and ridiculous ADVD, Flare Experience, E100 docking station, Konftel, 96xx/J-Series sets (with their tiny LCD screens)!!
Failing to rationalise cash cow product sets over the past 20-yrs to offer best-of-the-best has created a bloated (confused) and costly to maintain/develop portfolio. Can't understand why it's taken Avaya so long to wake up and adopt Alan Maserak's 'Do less with less' strategy to free up $ to develop a smaller best-of-best approach with core UC/CC offerrings.
Spaces and Workspaces are two worst products Avaya ever brought to market, they are light years behind our competitors
Go back further. Avaya's death is a result of insular, monopolistic thinking. AT&T became the worst RBOC rollup via poor acquisitions, weak backbone and eventual selloffs, Verizon kicks their bu-t in every way. Lucent thought their stuff didn't stink and wound up clinging to Alcatel as both ships sank into Nokia. Avaya has been a mess since day 1 of the Lucent spin-off - 22 years and just 2 years of profitability, billions in largely bad acquisitions resulting in revenues a third of what they were in 2000. They took 6 years to have a viable IP product allowing Cisco to eat their lunch, missed/missing Cloud completely because they were/are too interested in protecting the base than giving the base somewhere to go technologically (except to competitors). All while acting like the world revolves around them. Now the only thing circling Avaya are the vultures.
Being late to cloud was a ki---r from a technology standpoint. When we came out of the last bankruptcy in 2016, we were spending a lot of time talking about Oceana and Breeze (On Prem solutions) while our competitors started to GA cloud solutions. Even with the best Avaya Engineers in the world, those two solutions would still barely work and I still have not meet one person that said Oceana is a good solution.
Starting sooner on cloud would have been a big help. Look at IP Office for example, we had thousands of business partners selling that solution across the world and right when we started to containerize it for the cloud and add feature parity, we went with the RingCentral deal so we can get the $500 Million cash infusion for quick cash (keep in mind, $250 Million of that immediately went toward debt paydown).
CCaaS public was released recently in the last few years and Spaces is no where near Teams, Zoom or Webex from a feature standpoint where our enterprise customers can use.
From a technology standpoint, we have been behind for a very long time just relying on Aura and CM.
Approving practically every sale regardless of market price or margin for the sake of revenue and not simply letting the customer walk away for a few years then win them back.
"Software only", not willing to fix the J or K series. They let go the people that could "fix things" over the last 18 months. "Set primes" are not willing to implement the fixes because customers will want the "new/fixed" sets.