Help save 2 81c's

[NYCTechie]

I have an 81c supporting roughly 2200 clients and another with 1800 both have clients who sit both in San Francisco and Toronto. Toronto has and 81c running rls 5 and SF has and 81c as well.

What i would like, would be to offer a solution utilizing the existing switches at both locations and upgrading the to IP thru an avaya gateway.

How far am I away on the switches from making that happen? Is it upgrading to a current release, purchasing licenses and an Avaya gateway?

Just looking for the simplest way of allowing a client to go from SF to Toronto and have the same DID. It burns me that for 2million they want to sell a cisco solution when my nortels are there already and for 500k I can do the same thing better

 

[johnpoole]

you can add itg trunks but, one questions i tend to ask is what are you going to gain by going voip now? upgrading the nortels is cheaper. you can stil use voip/itg BUT is your like a lot of people and have a data geek in charge, then he only knows how to spell cisco.. the bad news is if you have to maintain and/or admin the new boxes.. 99 percent of thetime all your datateam can do is reboot

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[guycable2]

If they are both release 5 then you just need to add IP Phones,Signaling Servers and Media Cards (MC32) and utilize Virtual Office. You don't need to do a full scale release upgrade yet but it might be a reasonable thing to do given the PASS requirements.

The gateway (NRS)is an application that runs on the signaling servers that you would use to register your IP phones at each site or you can do a standalone sig server to act as the NRS to route calls between sites and provide virtual office.

 

[Triton101]

if you go full VoIP on the Nortel side of things you can use the Network-wide Virtual office......


Features and Services
IP Network-wide Virtual Office:

The IP Network-wide Virtual Office feature enables users to log into any IP Phone using their own User ID and password. This redirects the end user telephone calls and other features to the Virtual Office logged-in IP Phone.This can be the same Call Server or another Call Server within the network

__________________________________________________________
Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. - Confucius

 

[johnpoole]

__________________________________________________________
Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. - Confucius

or else go to work for the phone company..

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[Triton101]

__________________________________________________________
Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. - Confucius

 

[janaya]

You may be facing a brother-in-law deal. You need to find out what the reason would be to upgrade, as JPoole has stated. If you don't gain anything by upgrading why do it? The best response from those that want the upgrade is to tell the check signers "It's no longer supported..." Which is only partially true. It's no longer supported by the Manufacturer. If you aren't going to do anything with your system, then there are enough people out there to support that system for the next 5 years easy.

If they still want to upgrade, utilize your Avaya Account team to come in and show how they can accomplish the same thing for a fraction of the cost. Cisco is high, everyone here knows it, but if you go to the Cisco forum they will say how great it is.

I just don't see any need to perform an upgrade if it isn't going to make any money for your company. Too much wasted money regardless of which platform you go with.

But still someone's brother-in-law at Cisco may stand to make a large commission. then you are hosed any way you look at it.

 

[curtismo]

The problem is that when Cisco sells they don't talk to the persons that will actually run the system; they take the President/CEO/Directors/CFO out to golf. Totally top-down sales.

 

[NYCTechie]

Everytime they pitch an Idea to the innovations group, there is never a telco rep there. I'm trying to change that. I've been doing some reading on the side and have come across "ICD" Integrated call director" which seems to meet the requirement of the buisness. Any thoughts or opnions?

thank you all, for your input.

it was asked "what are you going to gain by going voip now?"
A. We have, and they are miserable! two seprate dpeartments within the org and each with their own agenda and $$. IPT, skype, and microsoft and the client is miserable.
a small army of technicians and engineers supporting us already why not just upgrade and offer a solution for the next 5 years that works! for about 500k compared to the 2m. already spent on Crud that doesn't work.

My thought is I have a stable platform in place, why not just upgrade and keep what I have. why change the engine when all you need is an oil change? no?

Reason for upgrade:I believe they are looking to develope an enviroment that any one client from either site can just sit at a workspace and still retrieve their VM and allow for a desk number to have clients to call back too.