After a long, hard winter, Avaya is set to spring back into the enterprise IP telephony market by declaring its entry into the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software business with the introduction of a new portfolio of enterprise applications as well as a new strategic roadmap that it hopes will mark a new era of "Intelligent Communications."

And to follow through on the new strategy, the leading IP communications provider is pulling out all the stops. It’s rolling out a huge marketing campaign that not only includes traditional advertising (print and online) but also as many as 120 events worldwide like a big presence at the Networld + Interop starting Monday in Las Vegas. It has also added a mix of guerilla marketing – outdoors on flatbed trucks or Times Square billboards – in order to "Debunk the Myths" that are plaguing the IP telephony market.

But Avaya's new strategy also come at a time when stepped up competition by Nortel, Siemens, Alcatel and particularly Cisco has put severe pricing pressure on enterprise IP telephony solutions and services. That was clearly evident during the past two fiscal quarters when up to 70 percent of Avaya's traditional services arrangements came up for renewal. Factor in the troubles the company has experienced in absorbing its Tenovis acquisition and it all added up to a less-than-stellar fiscal Q2 for Avaya.

So to gain more traction in the enterprise IP space, Avaya is hoping to carve out its own software niche by targeting enterprise communications functions as a business process to outsource – an emerging software category that the company calls "business communications applications" and estimates to be a $30 billion market by 2006.