Avaya

Avaya's professional-services organisation sells the work around the product: the design, migration, integration and support engagements that turn a platform order into a running communications estate. The pre-sales consultant's job is to scope that work: read the customer's telephony and contact-centre estate, match it to the Aura, IP Office and contact-centre lines, and write the services proposal that prices the engagement. It was the first time this career sat on the vendor side of unified communications rather than of networking, and the vocabulary of that world, call control, trunks, agents and queues, came from these months.

TDec Network Group, where the next ten months were spent, described itself as an integrator of communication and security systems, and the Avaya platforms sat there inside a wider portfolio of switching, firewalls and management. The two APSS tracks earned in 2013, Small and Medium Enterprise Communications and Unified Communications, were the partner-programme credentials for positioning those platforms, and the April 2014 CV lists the Design Specialist track beside them. They expired in 2014, by which time the work had moved to Extreme's metropolitan networks and Palo Alto Networks' firewalls; the record keeps them with their dates.