Avaya

Formerly part of AT&T, and the subject of an initial public offering a couple of years ago, Avaya installs cabling and telecommunications equipment around the world. Call it converged IT telephony and networking solutions if you like, but that is what it does in plain English.

Its predecessors' links with the Middle East go back a long way to the start of Saudi Telecoms and the early days of telephones. That was eons before the Internet arrived and telecommunications developed a private language of its own.

For the record, Avaya is 'US No1 with IP-enabled PBX lines' and 'No1 globally in voice messaging, unified communication and unified messaging'. Or put another way, No1 for Internet junction boxes and No1 for voice mailboxes, both solid and successful products that do not really require such obfuscation.

In the EMEA (Europe and Middle East Area) Avaya is No1 for 'structured cabling products and services' (cable installation in other words). The company is also a market leader in call centres, a growth phenomenon of our age. There have been some impressive regional contracts.

Avaya completed phase two of the communications infrastructure for the Dubai Media City and also fitted out phase three of the Dubai Internet City. This made the DIC and DMC 'home to one of the world's largest commercial Internet Protocol Telephony systems' - a long way of saying that Avaya installed the Internet network which also handles telephone calls.

The EMEA headquarters is located in Waterloo, Belgium and employs 2,500 people in 31 countries across this disparate region. The Gulf headquarters is in Dubai, while Avaya Labs are present in Tel Aviv, Israel. Saudi Arabia is still a big customer and the group had wide ranging ambitions for the region.

Given the rapid growth of the Internet in the Middle East - with subscribers expected to quadruple to 24 million over the next three years - Avaya looks set for an excellent few years.

There will be a lot of Internet junction boxes to install and miles of cabling to handle that number of Net subscribers. But in a region where not everyone has English as their first language, Avaya will have to learn to keep its technical jargon to a minimum.