Avaya's existence as a standalone company began Oct. 2, 2000, when spun off from Lucent Technologies and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AV. For more than a century prior to that day Ayaya were a part of Western Electric, ATT, and Lucent.

Avaya earned a reputation for creating high-performing, solidly reliable -- some would say "bullet-proof" -- enterprise communication solutions incorporating such products as deskset phones, office-building switches and switchboards, call-center systems, voice-mail software, cabling, and many others. Esteemed Bell Laboratories scientists won 1,600 pre-spinoff patents developing technology now under the Avaya banner.

Avaya's reputations for product quality and technological innovation are just as strong today, even as focus shifted to such areas as Internet Protocol telephony, wireless data communication, customer-relationship-management software and speech recognition technology.

The offspring Avaya Labs organization has added 100 more patents to the list of patents, as they create new ways to help companies route customer contacts, analyze their data networks for adding voice traffic, and find other ways to unleash the power of communications. New technologies, same focus: giving enterprises the communication tools they need to succeed in their endeavors.