Is COVID-19 the official cause of death to legacy PBXs? 4

[phoneguy610]

Hey all,

been some time and hope you are staying healthy, prosperous, and safe.

With everything going on in the world we recently had an internal meeting here and wanted to hear from the community. With nearly the entire world working from home, is the legacy PBX officially dead in favor of cloud solutions?

What are your thoughts?



viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[kwing112000]

We are seeing more and more of our customers moving to cloud. we have also set up a lot of hybrid type solutions with cloud and PBX's linked up to make working remotely easier with twinning and remote Aps or phones.

Kevin Wing
ACSS Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Communications
ACS- Implement IP Office
ACA- Implement IP Office
Vive Communications

 

[sbcsu]

The solutions that I see are VoIP/SIP systems directly connected onsite to a PABX - then the end users if remote can access SIP extensions on the VoIP system but also have the legacy solutions available onsite.

 

[curlycord]

I do think there will be more then usual digital sites that will tend to migrate to either IP PBX's or Hosted(Cloud), however digital will be here for awhile still but still getting smaller and smaller.





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[belevedere]

Hosted has it's place and line size. When you get to larger systems, hosted becomes very expensive. We still sell quite a few legacy systems, however they tend to go with SIP trunks/remote IP phones. It makes fail-over easier to administer.

 

[TouchToneTommy]

We've spent the last month helping customers with "legacy PBX"es work from home.

With a Group IPSec VPN, IP phones can connect from any remote site.

With proper firewall programming, softphones, smart phone apps, and SIP phones can connect from any remote site

Hosted systems, users can get a PoE Injector and take their office phone home with them

Even without the ability to use remote phones, Twinning can get calls to user's cell phones, and also allow users to call out through the pbx - as long as the dial tone is SIP or PRI, even if the legacy phones are digital TDM

 

[LoPath]

We had a business unit try to go "to the cloud" against our advice. They went with a big name and paid a big price. Post-implementation there were a lot of issues. One of them being the agent couldn't create conference calls. The vendor told us "we're not a PBX". In the end, both parties agreed to terminate the contract.

LoPath
Maintain HiPath 4000 V5 & V6, OpenScape Xpert V4 & V6, OpenScape Xpressions V7, OpenScape Contact Center V8, OpenScape Voice V9

 

[curlycord]

is the legacy PBX officially dead in favor of cloud solutions?"

When you say "legacy" I had assumed you meant Digital phone systems.
I cannot imagine an IP system being called a legacy system already, perhaps phoneguy610 you can confirm what system types you are referring too when you say "legacy"?

Thanks



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[Wanebo]

Larger systems were primed up to going private cloud and that jump is in progress. Smaller systems it simply makes sense to buy cloud services as you need them though.

In house TDM systems have been a dying breed for more than a few years. Now that no one wants to be in the office they are pretty much officially dead. H.323 systems have their limitations when cloud based even though they usually offer a better feature set. All the experts have been pointing to SIP for a while and it looks like that's where everything is going. Quickly.

 

[allworxguy]

Good thing I'll be retiring soon.

Marv ccna

 

[phoneguy610]

@curlycord TBH i meant anything where the server is on prem, but i still for sure see the continued use case of Converged PBXs that can handle IP as well. So i should rephrase, has COVID-19 killed the legacy digital pbx?

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[phoneguy610]

@lopath that seems more so like they found the wrong fit. May i ask your reasoning when trying to defer someone away from the cloud?

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[curlycord]

Thanks for clarifying.


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[LoPath]

@phoneguy610 - My comments are coming from an office building type of environment, not remote workers.

I mean, if the cloud solution can't meet the features you need, then why should you go to the cloud? I can't elaborate on which cloud vendor this was, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some other cloud vendor that could have done it. This one was a big name and couldn't.

Also, disaster recovery. As one of my mentors once told me, you can't put all of your eggs in one basket. Ask people how many times they have network problems. With a cloud solution, you'd better have redundancy and diversity with your network connections.

LoPath
Maintain HiPath 4000 V5 & V6, OpenScape Xpert V4 & V6, OpenScape Xpressions V7, OpenScape Contact Center V8, OpenScape Voice V9

 

[phoneguy610]

@lopath, love the conversation, hope you don't mind if I tackle these =)

I mean, if the cloud solution can't meet the features you need, then why should you go to the cloud? I can't elaborate on which cloud vendor this was, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some other cloud vendor that could have done it. This one was a big name and couldn't.

can you specify what feature? I was an engineer at nortel for some time and then Avaya Toshiba dealer for some time) so ton of experience with PBXs. Theres nothing on those systems our current cloud platform can't do so I'm curious to which feature you mean.

Also, disaster recovery. As one of my mentors once told me, you can't put all of your eggs in one basket. Ask people how many times they have network problems. With a cloud solution, you'd better have redundancy and diversity with your network connections.

Valid point but generally cloud infrastructures (such as ours for example) start at 1 million dollars worth of cybersecurity and geo diverse uptime tools. How would an on prep server beat that as far as DR or Uptime? Isn't that truly putting all your eggs in one basket? I know that was thrown around here a while back, but I think id chalk that up to FUD vs real reasoning more then anything else. As far as network problems go, that's a valid problem - and why its best to have a local partner providing voip services vs one of the big guys so they can provide qos tools, SD wan etc. Ive never met someone who with a properly deployed network had issues. So in short, either way you're putting your eggs in one basket. Wouldn't you prefer the million dollar secure basket vs the 10k scrapped together one?

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[belevedere]

I have found that premise based PBX users have a hard time using hosted phones when they cannot see who is on the phone, or place a call on hold and have someone with the line appearance pick it up. The concept of transferring a call to a person sitting next to you is foreign to them. When everyone is scattered at different locations, transferring is the only way to extend the call. I too have worked with several hosted providers, who after being bought out, scrapped their smaller customer base. The hosted users were tasked with finding a new provider and a new payment platform. When you crunch the numbers, after 3-4 years of hosted you own nothing and could have purchased a system several times over. Hosted has it's place and market, but it's not for everyone. Another way to describe cloud or hosted is, "someone else's computer". We too sell hosted solutions. But we fully explain the good and bad before getting a signature. I won't even go into FAX and external paging issues.

 

[kwing112000]

Belevedere we can do all of what you say on our cloud platform. We can do line appearances and also Park zones. We have BLF and it works very well. we were an Avaya shop and i have been doing IPO for about 15 years. I can do just about everything you could with the IPO on my cloud. We have a good Fax and Efax solution with it. Paging is pretty easy with a 3rd party paging adapter or paging through the phones.

Kevin Wing
ACSS Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Communications
ACS- Implement IP Office
ACA- Implement IP Office
Vive Communications

 

[belevedere]

Is your platform Avaya?

 

[LoPath]

@phoneguy610 - the biggest feature problem that they couldn't handle was conferencing. Our agents conference multiple parties together, sometimes starting from an inbound ACD call. The solution they tried was an add-on conferencing service. It was horrible. We'd have random people pop into our conferences! Hello, HIPAA violation?

I totally agree that the network can be improved and given the proper diversity and redundancy. Unfortunately a lot of businesses don't want to spend a penny on their infrastructure. Our company has been putting band-aids on the network for years. I've seen 3 regime changes on the IT side and nothing changes. They spend a ton of money on a pet project or two and leave the core network to crumble. I'm almost hoping our core switch will fail and cause the company millions in losses, as it was identified for replacement at least 8 years ago.

OK, that's enough apathy for today! TGIF

LoPath
Maintain HiPath 4000 V5 & V6, OpenScape Xpert V4 & V6, OpenScape Xpressions V7, OpenScape Contact Center V8, OpenScape Voice V9

 

[daiyates]

have been installing cloud and onsite systems over last year and have returned to many cloud systems to replace them with onsite systems due to customer dissatisfaction.