Fortunately, Avaya does have a road map for these old Norstar and BCM products. The old handsets, M & T series, will continue to work on with Avaya IP Office.

As part of the previously announced convergence strategy and the launch of Avaya IP Office Release 7.0, Avaya is announcing the End-of-Sale (EoS) for new systems of Avaya Business Communications Manager 50 (BCM 50) and Avaya Business Communications Manager 450 (BCM 450) products, nine (9) months from the date of this announcement, effective March 1, 2012.

Products required to upgrade, expand and maintain existing BCM systems will continue to be offered for another three (3) years to March 1, 2015. This includes software authorization codes, terminals, media bay modules, expansion units, replacement parts, and upgrades to the latest release (BCM R6.0).

In some cases it might not make sense to actually maintain older Nortel Meridian systems and in fact be cheaper to overhaul the whole system. Emerge IP’s Hosted PBX phone system is the cost-effective replacement for the Nortel BCM, Nortel BCM50, Nortel BCM450, Norstar and Meridian 1 CS1000 replacement.

Avaya, and Nortel whom Avaya acquired in 2005, both had an ‘evergreen’ strategy that committed to updates and upgrades to keep the systems current. Going from analog to digital to VoIP over the years.

But those systems were based on architectures that can’t take them forward, that prevent them from offering the next generation communications and collaboration capabilities organizations need to move forward.

To ease the burden for organizations running on legacy platforms, Avaya has created a series of upgrade promotions, depending on the model, age and other factors that dramatically reduce the cost of moving to a new platform.