Avaya chief savages Lucent

Don Peterson, CEO of Avaya, said that Lucent had failed to realize the high growth potential of the enterprise communications market, and instead had written off Avaya, Lucent's former enterprise communications division, as a cash liability.

Avaya took responsibility for its own cost cutting and spun-off as an independent company last October.

Speaking at Avaya's press and analyst conference in New York Peterson said: "Lucent took that opportunity to identify enterprise communications as a bad space and it's not. I think the left the fact that the business wasn't performing that badly out of some of their communications."

He said that Avaya would continue to partner with Lucent, but that it was also searching for opportunities with Lucent rivals such as Nortel and Cisco.

However, Peterson admitted that the big market leaders had not yet shown interest in working with Avaya.

"There is the opportunity to create broader relationships with networking companies but no ones approached us yet. Its on the to do list," he said.