If you are a current customer of Nortel (now Genband or Avaya) they have a free terminal emulator for download at:
You can write scripts in CLIScript (basically JavaScript) or for simple tasks, its Batch scripting language.
One cool thing it that CLIScript has an XML Object (aka E4X).
Since it is JavaScript, just include json2.js (download from
to make JSON available to your script.
There is a Script Manager utility which can concurrently run a script on multiple windows for a list of devices.
CLI*Manager scripting languages have nothing as powerful as Aspect's "when" command.
But more and more, as telnet gets disabled, CLIManager is the only option. Without a "when"-like command, the converted scripts are quite ugly when there are a variety of possible responses to a single command.
CLIManager can only handle successful logins - no failure scenarios are handled.