Disruptive Telephony

With today's big news in the VoIP / Unified Communications (UC) / telecom space of Avaya's acquisition of Radvision, pretty much all of the coverage has predictably focused on the video angle. While that's certainly important, I have a far bigger question:

What about Radvision's SIP and H.323 stacks?

More specifically -

will Avaya continue to support and promote the strong usage of Radvision stacks by other vendors?

Of all the coverage I've seen so far, only Tom Keating touched on this in his brief post:

They also developed a H.323 stack used in hundreds of VoIP and videoconferencing products before SIP became the dominant VoIP protocol of choice.

Beyond the popular H.323 stack, Radvision's SIP stack has also been used in a good number of products out there - and Radvision also developed stacks for RTP, MGCP and many other VoIP protocols. Just follow the links off of Radvision's developer page at:

http://www.radvision.com/Products/Developer/

to see the wide range of developer solutions they have developed over the years.

For those not familiar with this topic, a "stack" in developer-speak is basically a set of libraries that you can incorporate into your products to enable those products to communicate over a given protocol. So if you want to "SIP-enable" your product, you can license a "stack" from a company like Radvision rather than developing your own stack or using one of the various open source stacks that are out there. Licensing the stack also typically gets you support from the vendor and the ability to request changes/customizations/etc.

Radvision has enabled a good number of companies out there to get into the VoIP world. They have been a supplier of stacks to companies all across the VoIP / UC space.

Now they've been acquired by one of the largest vendors in the VoIP/UC space.

Will Avaya continue to support the widespread usage of Radvision's various stacks by other vendors?

Or will they restrict or reduce the usage? Or increase the costs? If so, what will the other vendor's do?

Can the various vendors using Radvision stacks trust Avaya to continue the developer program? Particularly when they may compete directly against Avaya?

Will there be more attention paid now to other providers of SIP and VoIP stacks?

THAT is the question that I'm most curious about in the midst of this merger...

Other Articles

Some of the pieces worth reading on this topic include:

• Zeus Kerravala on NoJitter: Why Avaya Buying Radvision Makes Sense (Updated: Deal Is Official)
• Henry Dewing's Blog at Forrester: Avaya Acquires Radvision
• Carl Ford on TMCnet: Avaya Buys Radvision for $230 Million
• TechCrunch: RadVision Finally Finds A Home With Telecom Giant Avaya — For $230 Million
• eWeek: Avaya to Buy Radvision, Ramping Competition With Cisco
• TheNextWeb: Done deal: Avaya buys video conferencing tech firm RADVISION for $230m in cash (some useful links)

P.S. Hat tip to Forrester's Henry Dewing, too, for at least recognizing the usage of Radvision's stacks, although he did not ask the question I'm asking here.

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