Avaya Support Alternatives? 10

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

My company provides support and service contracts for several hundred Definity, S8700 and S8500 systems that currently have either existing Avaya maintenance contracts or are under warranty from Avaya.

As these contracts expire, we are advising our customers not to renew them due to the extreme cost and lack of any real value from Avaya. We will now support these systems directly without involving Avaya except for upgrades and licensing issues.

We are looking for a reliable way to provide alarm monitoring like "Expert Systems" in-house without relying on a 3rd party monitoring service to notify us when an alarm occurs in the switches.

What do other BusinessPartners do to provide this service or do I have to stick with Avaya?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks.

Betty Ryan
NOC Administrator

 

[irisngen]

As far as the contracts go, you can do as my company does which was to jut pay for maintenance assist. this gives us access to Tier 3 from 8-5 M-F, S & S 24X7 = T&M

 

[Mike2005]

The IRISnGen had better be good at $35,000.00 a copy. For that price it should make coffee as well.

 

[irisngen]

to start, but the support, & the product are worth it. When Avaya comes around to actually let us play with the software instead of "renting" it we are all forced for third party products.

 

[orypecos]

If Avaya 'Expert System' is configured correctly, it will call to all systems under maintenance and see if it can connect. It might have been that Avayas' 'right hand' didn't tell its' 'left hand' that you had maintenance.
Avaya has had over 8 ticketing systems in the last 10 years and trying to port info from each system to another has always been a problem. Just as soon as they got all the problems worked out with one tkting system, they changed to another. As far as I could see, they changed systems just cuz they thought newer was better without a thought of the decreased quality service to their customers. One must remember that Avaya is run by Liberal Arts majors, not engineers or others with proffessional experience with technical systems.

 

[Rick46256]

orypecos, have a star.

Well put. I found that 'Expert Systems' would receive an alarm from our Definity system but would do nothing with it.

Neither my company nor the end user would be notified by Avaya, and checking the 'list history' would show that even several days after receiving the alarm no login attempts would even be made by Avaya to try to resolve the alarm.

And that would cost us $1 a port per month (1750 ports). We are now looking for an alternative to Avaya. Any suggestions?

 

[irisngen]

Pay me, i'll monitor anything,lol

 

[phoneguy55]

I use my local Avaya Business Partner. They are small and bend over backwards to make me happy. Mantenance costs have dropped 30%.

 

[cduff]

Anyone use Continuant

 

[gregarican]

It's shame that the AT&T products have gotten watered down to this degree. From AT&T then to Lucent and finally to Avaya. Perhaps there are Avaya partners, VAR's, and third party support folks who are outstanding. But as for Avaya themselves they are far behind the curve.

I recall back in 2001 purchasing some Merlin Magix equipment and trying to obtain *paid* tech support for them from Avaya. No one I spoke with had an idea how a basic INA board worked. I figured perhaps I had just been forwarded to the wrong group so I tried calling again. After six or seven attempts I finally gave up, dug into the documentation, and was able to muddle things through on my own. Same with the CTI support for the Magix. It seems as if Avaya has changed gears many times over the past few years in this area so I finally started coding my own TSAPI client after running into dead air trying to get answers.

Looking at situations like this I can understand why Avaya would want to keep a closed, proprietary system. If anyone else could be opened up to the market Avaya would soon be buried since their in-house support is relatively poor...

 

[Rick46256]

Thanks guys, We are going to place an order for the alarmtraq product. It seems to be the best value for us. We ran the evaluation for a week or so and it was very easy to implement.

Has anyone had any trouble making alarmtraq work with an S8700 using PPP connections? We can't find any docs relating to it on thier web site.

 

[mikej97204]

Cduff, we are using Continuant right now. We switched to them from a local mom and pop type service that was ok except they were slow to respond or didn't respond at all when we had a couple a serious problems.

So far, I'm not real impressed with Continuant either. They were suppose to test and program a backup MapD card and after doing this for 2 weeks they found out that I had sent them the wrong card... a TN802B rather than the TN801B MapD. They've had the right card for a couple of weeks now, but it's still not done. I also wanted to get a bunch of cleanup vectoring done and some changes made that I wasn't sure I could do without problems and after getting a quote for 8 hours of work required to do this, I find out by people on this forum that what we want can't be done because we are set up as a call center. I imagaine they would have started the work and then told me they could do it or would have to do something totally different to make it work the way we wanted.

There are a few other things I'm not real happy about so far. We have yet to have a problem with our Definity while we have been with them, so I'll see how it goes when we have a real serious problem and need their support right away. If they can handle the emergencies real well, I can live with the other stuff they can't do.

Mike

 

[Mike2005]

How about Reliatel? They have a good product but very expensive I think.

 

[Rick46256]

reliatel is good but very expensive.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

AlarmTraq is still your best value.