Conference Bridge suggestions?

[MitelInMyBlood]

I'm looking for recommendations for a professional quality or carrier grade audio "meet-me" conference bridge, i.e., something the quality, size and feature-set of the Avaya/Spectel bridge. (they are one under consideration)

Cost is not a factor.

At a minimum it needs to support moderator access codes and participatant codes w/selectable (on or off) announced entry & departure of participants, presentation modes w/on-the-fly moderator controlled switching between modes, programmable size limits, recording, logging, reporting, selective participant force-off, alarming, maintenance diagnostics, etc., etc.

I have not ruled out any architectures including IP, but unless someone really has a better mousetrap the interface would most likely be PRI with capability for at least (minimum of) 9 PRIs (200 concurrent ports) and capability to bridge all 200 ports into one common conference, if needed.

Any suggestions of what other products to look at (besides the Avaya/Spectel) would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[TheMitelGuy]

Mitel Conference Server - not yet out, but will be powerful when it does. Nice device (runs off of the MAS 6000). Will support 30 at introduction and over 200 when complete.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

Talk to me when it's a mature product with a track record we can show the man who will be writing the check. Regretably I cannot go to the table with anything that's in CI.

My timeframe for the decision making is probably 6 to 9 months out, but I still can't go in there with anything that doesn't have an established user base. The Spectel bridge has set the bar pretty high.

 

[mgelfand]

Hello!
We just signed a deal with SBC Conference NOW. They were the best game in town. We check Intercall and Broadwing, and got the best deal from SBC Conference NOW.

Here's the lady who set us up.

Bethany Schultz
Account Manager
bschultz@conferenceplus.com
(888) 857-9070 toll free
(847) 413-2770 direct

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

Thanks mgelfand!

However, we're looking to do it ourselves (in house) with our own hardware. We have so very many (sometimes 50 or more daily) separate conference calls with participants spread far and wide across multiple nodes of our own internal voice network that all of the external offerings eventually become cost prohibitive if for no other reason than the LD charges (and depletion of PSTN trunks) for many of our participants to get to the external service providers.

One of our business partners today has one of the Spectel conference bridges and we have used it and visited their site to see it first hand. It meets our requirements almost as if we wrote our own RFP around it.

But we're still shopping and open to all reasonable suggestions. Whatever it is will have to be a hardware solution that we can tie in to one of our voice network tandem switches and operate ourselves without reliance on or involvment by a 3rd party or having to fight with reconciling billing issues.

 

[rhandel]

Mitel has the IGC Conference Server

http://www.mitel.com/DocController?documentId=10878.

Was oririnally developed by Remoteability, a company started by Vocaltec founder. Was purchased by VCON and now Emlaze. It supports upwards of 196 ports and can be IP/PRI integrated. We have sold and installed a handful successfully. Great admin and user interface tools.

 

[TheMitelGuy]

I *believe* Mitel is dropping that product in the coming months.

 

[rhandel]

Had not heard that at recent VIP Forum in NYC. They did mention the quick conference application which was supposed to be supported on MAS server, but in fact will require its own.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

We too were told that the VCON product won't be around (or won't be in the Mitel portfolio) much longer. Thanks for the suggestion tho. We still have around 6 mos to get something identified and get some proposals.