True - But put yourself in my shoes for a minute. I work directly for "the customer" as the industry likes to call it.
The industry is not geared up to be particularly helpful to engineers employed directly by customers.
We have 15 G3Si switches across Europe, offer category A - ECS - All SCCs, 4 being medium sized (4 cab. with EAS enabled). Most I&M work is performed internally, maintenance contracts only being used to ensure Lucent contact for things like init logins to change customer options / hardware replacement.
Is Avaya's partnership scheme available to us ?
Personally I doubt it, but I will check. They even double the cost of their engineer training for customers.
Maybe things are the way they are partly because of Avaya's roots, steming from what was a large private monopoly(publically owned during World War 1) with a lot of history?
Don't get me wrong. Avaya's products are great (although there is room for improvement) ... Sometimes, though, as a customer engineer, obstacles are annoying, especially when considerably fewer exist with other companies with whome we deal.
And as the customer it makes us think hard long term about the future of our voice operations, and more importantly about vendors.
Credit where it's due, though, at least Avaya are opting for open standards these days - Q-SIG for instance. This is a step in the right direction, demand lead probably.
They'll be using open standard handsets next if we're really lucky ;-)
Anyway - Enough from me - Just a few thoughts in an open forum. Avaya are great, but as with everything - could be better.
