Important question Should I stay with Avaya?

[Irvineguy]

I've been working on an Avaya platform for 2 years and I have the opportunity to work with a open source VOIP solution.

I'm not sure if I should stick with Avaya and increase my knowledge (on a none VOIP platform) or go to the open source VOIP solution which will give me more work experience on the data/ network side.

 

[Mitch672]

AVAYA is THE leader in VoIP technology, despite what CISCO pundits think. Your AVAYA experience can get you a nice job with a business partner, or many other places. Opensource platforms such as Asterisk, are overrated, and are never going to replace true business phone systems. AVAYA is also King of the Call Center, no one even attempts to argue any other way. See if you can get your company to upgrade their platform to an S-Series, would be my suggestion

Mitch

 

[phoneguy55]

x2

 

[rgtrgt]

X3

 

[big70]

x4

 

[Duaneness]

x5

 

[simreal]

I want to disagree with 672.


My Cisco Dealer is constantly trying to tell me they are better at call center than Avaya.

I have yet to get my IPCC working properly without having to restart at least one server or service a week.

X6

 

[mgraval]

x6

 

[mgraval]

x7

 

[Irvineguy]

Ok so this is not a biased opinion right? j.k LoL

 

[simreal]

Well I Have Call Center staff on Aspect ACD, Cisco IPCC, Avaya S8700, Nortell, and NEC.


I will tell you that not only does Avaya offer the best product as far as feature set but they administration and upkeep are the least complicated of all of my systems.

Avaya is competative in price or beats every other vender I currently deal with.

 

[simreal]

I should also mention I am a Asterisk Hobbyist. If there is such a thing. I have setup my own Asterisk box at home.

I consider myself telecom, linux, & general technology savvy and the Asterisk is a nightmare to administer.

 

[Irvineguy]

Wow good to know thank you!

 

[big70]

You need to stay with avaya, but do the Cisco course,s
CCNA and CCNP.

Best there is is an Cisco network with a Avaya PBX....


Greets Peter

 

[madwok]

I have Nortel, Rockwell , Cisco and Avaya for call center

Avaya is best in general ACD & administration & reliability . I have no bias as to me they are just boxes . Cisco is not there yet in features and stability . Nortel is fine but cumbersome in administration . Rockwell is good but so old so there is hardly any more support.

I also play with Asterisk but to me it is pretty darn good but not in the commercial/enterprise grade yet . Giving time , it will be better than Cisco in price/performance ratio

 

[techma1]

Before you do anything check out how much it will cost your company to keep your Avaya maintenance if you have it. They WILL NOT support anything that isn't within 2 releases of the current CM4. Forcing customers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every couple of years. For those customers currently on maintenance but aren't within the last 2 releases....when something dies then Avaya leaves you hanging until you upgrade!!!!! And if you don't have to then don't move beyond release 9.5 because it does everything that CM4 does and you can find maintenance cheaper!!! It even does IP softphones. Good Luck

 

[Mitch672]

techma1, AVAYA has reasons for this, and is NOT the only one who does this. I had CISCO tell a customer of ours that has both an older Call Mangler (Call Manager ) and and AVAYA G3Si-R11, that they no longer support their version of Call Mangler, and they MUST upgrade.

The business reasons are pretty clear; it's not easy to support older releases, and they also have end of lifed many of the older switches and circuit packs (G3SI, G3CSI, etc), so they cannot get replacement parts, although they are certainly available on the secondary market.

They will support you on maint, if they can do it remotley, but finding techs who have ANY knowledge of these older systems is difficult. Just find a new tech who can support a Duplicated G3SI system, not gonna happen.

Also, R9.5 does not support everything. It did not have EC500, IP softphones where primitive, doesn't have support for 9600 IP phones, etc etc. Besides, how are Business Partners supposed to stay in business with no upgrades?

mitch

 

[techma1]

Gee Mitch are you sitting in the Avaya presidents office? It's on page 3 of the customer options as ENHANCED EC500. Really I don't blame Avaya for not wanting people to operate without having their license files needed for anything above 9.5. It's theirs and they certainly have the right to protect it. But for us secondary market folks that know a lot about the "old" stuff and the new stuff... It's still a more reliable and cost effective way to run businesses that don't have all of the money nor need for the flash on the bleeding edge. Consider how much Avaya charges for each station to be enabled or each feature to be turned on. Avaya charges almost $10,000 to turn on EC500. Just for one feature!!!!! Besides why would you want to use a new tech that doesn't even know the history behind what he's doing?

 

[rgtrgt]

My only issue with Avaya so far, is that when the end of support runs out on the v9's & below, they are telling me that i will lose my MSP's. that is not very good customer policy. if they dont want to support them fine, but why take my permissions away from either doing it myself or using a 3rd party. i hope they wise up to that.

 

[Mitch672]

Well techma1, if you bought a new switch, EC500 with an IP Softphone license has a bundled price of $130 each NPL (list)

In reality, it costs LESS to support the newer switches, and, you are probably not aware of this, but the S8300 has a few bundles, that are very, very inexepensive. there is a 50 user, 100 user, 150 and a 200 user bundle. The G700/S8300 hardware is much less costly than the TN circuit packs, the new gateways are all IP enabled and come with the equivilant of CLAN, MEDPRO and a VAL all built in. I started with the older platforms, but the new stuff is far better, and less costly.

I work for an AVAYA Business Partner, I setup new S8300's and S8710/20 systems mostly, there is no comparison on the ease of setup of the newer systems, as long as you are well versed in LAN / IP technology. I can setup an entire S8300, in about 4 hours, using ProVision or starting with a previous client translation (you restore an old trans and re-work it). Also, most customers now want IP phones, CISCO has done a good job of convincing clients they need IP, although it does't really get them much. Also the IA770 is great, it now comes FREE with CM4, so we don't have to price out a separate audix LX or Modular Messaging system for most of the smaller clients

try to be more open minded, older doesn't always mean better.

Mitch