Telecommunications company Avaya files for bankruptcy

We had a server through which the conversation (SIP, converted from landlines) went, and enabled the agent to interact with the call through either a web page, or hitting keys on their phone. Transfers, blind or not, holds, recordings, assistance, we could handle all of it. To dumb phones. Literally things that weren't able to display the time of day.

Mobile is doing diddly squat, frankly. Same as softphones. The voice quality over wi-fi is terrible, and what's the point of using a mobile device if it needs to be plugged in anyway. Softphones never took off because call centres couldn't reuse their headphone equipment, and having a headphone's "pick up" button work on a softphone was impossible, at scale. It also meant that actually interacting with the call was tricky (change focus of the window to find the numpad, then either click on digits, or type on the keyboard).

One major game changer, however, seems to be WebRTC. A lot of companies are investing big on it (see Dixa and COLT for example).

I really think this is a generational problem. Callcentres of old want the highly integrated hardware. Train your people once, and then they can become robots. New, modern places want the ability to switch providers. They want their agents to be close to the customer, and even closer to the tracking/reporting software stack, without going through 10 layers of proprietary integration.

WebRTC also means that you can simply talk to the person on your website, while you see what they see, and can walk them through whatever they need.

There are though, operations that require scale or functionality that either doesn't exist, or isn't quite bulletproof in the open source world.

SS7 connectivity, geographically spread call centers, priority queuing based on multiple concurrent data sources, drag-drop complex IVR software, natural language parsing, natural language generation, contextual screen pops with hooks to caller information, and so forth.

Some of those are available in open source, yes. Not necessarily proven at scale, easy to integrate, etc.

Of course, Avaya filing for bankruptcy hints that there aren't many customers that need this sort of stuff anymore. Either the support function is shifting to chat/email, or they are using SaaS vs their own equipment.

This simplistic analysis however ignores that before the buyout the company might have been a prosperous self-sustaining entity fully capitalized by common stock with little debt. That common stock, made into a small percentage of the capital structure by the buyout, is often wiped out too in the event of bankruptcy - indeed it is usually at the bottom of the totem pole in that capital structure. So although they may no longer be majority owners, bankruptcy is typically an unhappy event for long-time stockholders of the company such as founders, employees holding company stock in their 401ks, etc.

Perversely this is the kind of company PE outfits typically go after - in their worldview it is a waste of leveraging potential not to apply debt to such a company. I recommend reading "Barbarians at the Gate" if you are interested in this topic.

I have experience with Asterisk and the Mizu VoIP softswitch only. Asterisk is quite limited on capacity, but that mizu server can handle 10000 simultaneous calls on a cheap Xeon server (full B2B calls with billing and RTP proxy and all the PBX stuff such as IVR, voicemail, conference).

This capacity is enough for a whole smaller country and these kind of software solutions can be easily scaled.

Of course, you can buy the same capacity 100x more expensive from a hardware vendor.