I think Avaya screwed up buying Nortel. They could have got that customer base without buying Nortel. The MICS and CICS where great platforms but the BCM was pretty poor. Plus they bought all the Option 81/ cs1000 stuff which was good as a TDM system but wasn't much on IP side. Avaya was king on the contact center side at one time. Another thing was developing new phones too often and Stopping support on great phones like the 5400 series phones. As for hosted being the way to go and future...ummmm tell that to someone that has more than 15 phones. We install voip/TDM and hosted....our customers are much more happy with voip/TDM. Once you get over 12 phones hosted gets expensive unles you have lots of toll...not to mention the bandwidth requirement to the web. Try replacing a good solid key system with hosted...they will come begging for keys system back. The most expensive part of any system is phones and hosted doesn't save any there. It suck as a customer when your internet dies on hosted and you can't even call the office next to you. A good solid TDM / voip with sip trunks is the way to go IMO
