In an interesting turn of events, investment powerhouse Merrill Lynch is dumping their existing deployment of Cisco's IP voice telephones for new systems from Avaya.

An article from CNet describes the defection as having taken place due to "network utilization issues."

Those familiar with Avaya will note that this is a 1990's spin-off of Lucent (from the old Bell Labs), so I guess everything old is new again.

Merrill is not abandoning VoIP, though, they have just changed vendors for handsets and will continue to use the technology to reduce telecommunications costs.