It was devised back when Nortel and Avaya/Lucent had the lion’s share of the PBX market, and when VoIP was far less mature than it is today. The strategy aimed at transitioning weary customers from TDM systems to VoIP progressively, thus allowing incremental steps, and progressively locking the customer into the Nortel solution. The thought was that a small incremental step would be cheaper initially than a rip and replace from Cisco or whoever, and would make the customer progressively more comfortable with the VoIP concept. Of course this was a complex strategy, with many moving parts, and compared with the simplicity of Cisco’s forklift strategy. Avaya had a similar strategy

Fast forward 2006. VoIP is now much more stable, customers are much more familiar, and pricing continues to edge downwards. There are a lot fewer qualms now about forklift: it is simpler, quicker, gets it done, so the customer can then move on and focus on other priorities. (note: are there also SOX issues? with a migration plan, you may not be able to recognize revenues for years)

In summary, Nortel’s comples progressive migration strategy was designed for a different age when they had market dominance, and when customers viewed VoIP with suspiscion. The equipment is fine. It’s the marketing and strategy that have become stale.