The directory is turning into a battleground as a wide range of IT vendors fight to handle multiple forms of communication, according to Donald Peterson, chairman and CEO of Avaya.“Everybody’s after everybody’s lunch, and that’s absolutely true about this,” Peterson said. Avaya’s Intelligent Communications platform and similar systems from other vendors take advantage of a common IP infrastructure to bring together voice, e-mail, text messaging, video and other forms of communication. Several vendors, including Avaya, are working with Microsoft to let customers use Windows Live Communications Server (LCS) as a front end to those applications. However, for Avaya to keep from becoming just a provider of network plumbing, it needs to keep its own voice-network directory in the picture, rather than hand over directory data to Microsoft as some competitors have done, said Peterson during a moderated discussion with Extreme Networks President and CEO Gordon Stitt, held at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas on Tuesday. In order to keep providing call control, access control and a variety of information about presence—how each user can and wants to be reached—Avaya needs to maintain its own directory system, Peterson said in an interview after the keynote. Rather than centralizing information about each user in one directory, Avaya wants a standard way to make the voice and data network directories work together, he said.Saying he didn’t mean to criticize LCS, Peterson said Microsoft’s product isn’t up to handling big telephony deployments. “It’s a reality. It’s going to be used in the office. … I don’t believe it will be a large enterprise solution, and I don’t believe that Microsoft has asserted that they know how to get there,” Peterson said.Peterson pointed to Google as perhaps the next major player in directories. “I don’t want to build up Google in their fight with Microsoft at the expense of losing my own battle with Google later,” he said. Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google’s enterprise unit, will give a keynote address at the show on Wednesday.Peterson and Stitt spoke glowingly of a technology and marketing partnership between their companies, but they downplayed the idea of a merger. The relationship is working well the way it is, they said.“It’s not clear that our customers would see any value to us becoming one,” Stitt said.-Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content BrandPost The future of trust—no more playing catch up Broadcom: 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT By Eric Chien, Director of Security Response, Symantec Enterprise Division, Broadcom Mar 31, 2023 5 mins Security BrandPost TCS gives Blackhawk Network an edge with Microsoft Cloud In this case study, Blackhawk Network’s Cara Renfroe joins Tata Consultancy Services’ Rakesh Kumar and Microsoft’s Nilendu Pattanaik to explain how TCS transformed the gift card company’s customer engagement and global operati By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 1 min Financial Services Industry Cloud Computing IT Leadership BrandPost How TCS pioneered the ‘borderless workspace’ with Microsoft 365 Microsoft’s modern workplace solution proved a perfect fit for improving productivity and collaboration, while maintaining security of systems and data. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 1 min Financial Services Industry Microsoft Cloud Computing BrandPost Supply chain decarbonization: The missing link to net zero By improving the quality of global supply chain data, enterprises can better measure their true carbon footprint and make progress toward a net-zero business ecosystem. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 31, 2023 2 mins Retail Industry Supply Chain Green IT Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe