After much speculation, Avaya filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering worth $1 billion.

After the IPO, the networking and communications technology vendor will be valued at $5 billion. A part of the funds raised in the issue will be used to pay down long-term debt, among other things, Avaya said in a statement.

Several firms managing the IPO for Avaya include, Morgan Stanley & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co., J. P. Morgan Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, UBS Investment Bank and Credit Suisse Securities.

Avaya was a unit of AT&T, then part of Lucent Technologies. It became an independent company when it spun off from Lucent in 2000, when it was listed on the NSE. Silver Lake and TPG Capital, two venture capitalists bought the company for $8.3 billion in 2007 and made it private.

Avaya over took overtake Cisco Systems as the world’s top vendor of enterprise telephony technology after taking over Nortel Network’s enterprise business unit for $915 million acquisition in late 2009. The company partners with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Polycom and Skype.

According to a repot in The Wall Street Journal, Avaya’s revenue grew 24 percent in the six months that ended March 31. However, the repot also noted that at the same time its loss rose from $421 million a year to $615 million per year now.