Are you cutting your telephony platform to Cisco? 1

[adminman3]

We are moving to Cisco soon. Nobody on the telecom side is thrilled with this proposal. Has anyone else moved recently, and do you have any insights or warnings for us?
(I know, if you are Cisco, why would you be on this forum?)

 

[jimbojimbo]

What Cisco seems to be doing lately is to convince the IT department they need to upgrade their network to make it "voice ready". What this means is they will install all new hardware which includes the DS1 capabilities in the routers. After they have the network upgraded they come back and give the great story of how you can now install Call Manager at a cost below Avaya. The reality is you already spent the money for most of the Call Manager hardware when you upgraded your network. If your Network Team has already wasted their money on the network upgrade you may be in a losing battle. For a basic admin PBX the Call Manager is functional but as stated previously for ACD you can forget it. Cisco doesn't understand ACD. They have cobbled together a variety of products from different aquisisitons.

I believe Avaya's virtualization story along with Unified Communications product line beats Cisco hands down. Why anyone would want to rip out an Avaya system at this point is beyond me.

 

[mikeydidit]

http://www.avaya.com/master-usa/en-us/resource/assets/premiumcontent/nemertestco.pdf

I found this to be enlightening to say the least. If "the powers to be" would read this, this thread would not exists.

When is the last time you helped someone, just because you were able to?

For the best response to a question, read faq690-6594

 

[dufus2506]

The biggest fault that Cisco has (IMO) is that it requires not one, not two, not three, but a virtual FARM of servers for each of it's services.

An Avaya system might have at best 5 or so servers, all of which are under maintenance with Avaya. No such thing with Cisco. You buy the servers, and maintain them yourselves.

The last system I was looking at for another company would have required 28 servers in a non-duplicated environment, and 42 in a high availability build.

Servers don't last very long. How long is usually dependent on what it's doing, but how many of us would keep a server longer than, say 5 years? Would you want to replace 28 or more servers every 5 years?

The more services you can put into hardware, the better off you are. And frankly, the Avaya product does that very well. Sadly, they're moving away from this strategy with systems like Modular Messaging. But as long as the larger system keeps a minimum of servers in it's architecture, I'll still prefer Avaya.

Carpe dialem! (Seize the line!)

 

[kjrnec]

If you've got access to training from Avaya or an experienced person on staff Avaya probably makes more sense. But without adequate training on their newest equipment your at the mercy of your BP. With Cisco there are probably enough training resources and information out there to fix most problems. I only know of 1 other site besides this one where you can get help with most problems.

Avaya's support is next to useless unless you can get someone in the states. If your support request gets sent over to Argentina all bets are off. Support for this company is the worse I've ever seen. If your PBX alarms constantly like ours as long as it's not immediately service affecting forget about anyone helping you to figure out what's going on.