Perhaps I can act as a kind of mediator as I see this thread getting a little off topic.
All of us here, have or have had a passion for Nortel products such as Norstar and BCM etc. It's been a proven product that has sold worldwide over the 30 or more years which I consider to be a very long time in the electronics business.
Most of us will still know of customers who have a Norstar working well and this carries on with BCM's systems that had more features but tended to have more issues with moving parts such as hard disks or fans etc, but the concept of what the BCM did was on the same lines as the good old Norstar 6 + 16.
As I've said above, the BCM has been an excellent kit for customers due to it's simplicity compared to it's larger brother such as the Meridian 1 (Option 11-81 range). Avaya did what they did to cease development in favor of it's IP Office system.
It's just not possible to carry on with a system unless it's continually in tune with what the rest of the world is using such as 64 bit computers and newer versions of Office etc. CPU's and memory are always getting bigger and faster which means that Telephone systems have to redesign them or just shelve it and start afresh with a new product as manufacturers such as Mitel tend to do.
With regards to the E-Metrotel system, this bit of kit is very neat and it does as mentioned by others above. I tried out a demo version running on an old laptop that was destined for the bin with a 60 gig SSD in it. I was impressed with what it could do. It's based on an Asterisk Server, but the ex-nortel guys have managed to add in both Meridian 1 and Norstar / BCM wired sets and IP phones together onto one platform which for me was very impressive. I tried a number of combinations with SIP trunks and it works.
The only downside is that there doesn't appear to be a strong base of customers using E-Metrotel over this side of the pond. This is something that I feel should be explored by them as we are losing "Nortel" customers at a very fast rate. It's a very tough business to be selling telecom's kit these days and it seems that IP Office is currently doing quite well for the smaller market as it's very flexible. Mitel, Cisco are also good sellers with a number of smaller lesser known brand names.
I appreciate that the research and development costs need to be paid for and so it should because of what E-Metrotel have done. From my angle, it does appear to be expensive, but as suggested above, it depends on kit the customer currently has and what they eventually want to achieve. I just wish that they were able to put their name about with advertising over here.
Firebird Scrambler
Nortel & Avaya Meridian 1 / Succession & BCM / Norstar Programmer
Website =
linkedin
