Verizon (s vz) has come out against Nortel (s nt) selling its enterprise telephony business to Avaya, which has offered about $475 million for it, because neither the seller nor the buyer want to take on the contracts to service the equipment currently installed in U.S. government and business offices. Verizon provides connectivity to those offices (and the devices in them) and is worried that it would be stuck with any equipment that fell into disrepair. Put another way: Verizon might be forced to pay for new gear, which would cut into the fat margins on those government contracts. Verizon has filed a motion to block the sale, which you can read here.
Om,
Enterprice network is all about VOIP, which Nortel happily provided and supported.
http://products.nortel.com/go/product_content.jsp?segId=0&catId=null&parId=0&prod_id=37501&locale=en-US
http://products.nortel.com/go/product_content.jsp?segId=0&catId=null&parId=0&prod_id=59140&locale=en-US
Basically AVAYA is milking money here. they want to buy Nortel stuff for cheap, then charge Verizon on service and upgrades.
I remember how the split of AVAYA from Lucent was wrote as AVAYA will focus on VOIP ( lesser technology) while the mother ship Lucent was supposedly work on optical ( money cutting edge) and such.
We know what happened after the split.
Now back to reality , Verizon is ( was , and always) conservative , never spends that “much” money for maintaining their service.
They might want Avaya to provide some guarantee for service after the sale.