Earlier today, Avaya (NYSE:AV) and Juniper (Nasdaq:JNPR) announced that they formed a global strategic relationship to deliver enterprise class VoIP solutions to enterprises.  The partnership will leverage Juniper's routing and security solutions with Avaya's enterprise communications equipment, with each company being able to resell each other's products and services.

From Juniper's perspective, this deal enables the company to tap into Avaya's large installed base of PBX / IP PBX gear, and will be a catalyst to more sales of Juniper's enterprise routing solutions (including products such as the J-Series enterprise router).  This move is another piece of Juniper's puzzle in its quest for expanding its enterprise networking portfolio (after NetScreen - firewalls/VPNs, Perbit - WAN acceleration and Redline - application front end technology).

Avaya gets another relationship in the routing space (where it already had a deal with Extreme), and a best-in-class partner to jointly develop products geared to enterprise employees in remote, branch or mobile locations.  Of course, Avaya maintains that the relationship with Juniper is "complementary" to the one with Extreme, but that remains to be seen.  A more interesting consideration is whether or not we will see a subset of the Avaya call processing software being productized on a future Juniper routing solution targeting the SME market segment, and what is the time-to-market for such a product.