As a vendor in a forum like this, I know we're not supposed to promote or sell, however I hope that we can respond to a posting with an explanation regarding costs from a philosophical perspective. If not, then I'll apologize in advance.
Altmank, we appreciate your consideration of intelli-CTi and we do understand that different organizations have different needs and budget constraints, as well as different views on what they find value in. Based upon our research of other CTI products, we believe our pricing is appropriate for the features and options intelli-CTi offers. It is priced higher than some, and lower than others. And compared to a one-off custom project, it offers some real value in three specific areas.
First is the depth of functionality and configurability that it offers. It's not simply click-to-dial and screen-pop, rather it offers quite a wide range of touchpoints within Dynamics CRM to provide not only significant productivity enhancements, but also detailed business intelligence about all of your phone call activities. The heritage of intelli-CTi dates back over 14 years of working directly with customers on their CTI needs (some very customized - an on a variety of CRM platforms), as well as working through a global channel of CRM implementation partners to deliver a solution that is both comprehensive in functionality and relatively easy to deploy. I won't pitch functionality here; if someone is interested in the depth and breadth of the integration with CRM that intelli-CTi provides, they can find details on the link within this thread already.
Another point to make is the phone system independence intelli-CTi offers. The investment made to integrate with IPOffice isn't a one-off custom project, rather it's very phone-system independent. If you decide that the IPOffice isn't going to work for you as you've grown out of it, your investment in intelli-CTi is intact - you can move to the Avaya Aura platform or off Avaya altogether to another popular platform, since intelli-CTi supports a wide range of phone systems. With a custom project, you get what you asked for and if you decide to change telephony platforms, you may be starting all over (or close to it).
And lastly, as we all know, Microsoft and Avaya are not known for standing still. With a custom project, if either of them make changes (take the recent rollups 10 and 12 of CRM as examples), your custom project just expanded in cost, through no fault of your own, whereas with a system like intelli-CTi, this is what we do for a living; keep in step with the vendors and customers we support. You know up-front what your costs will be.
Now, any of these things may not seem to be of importance to you at this time, however we often hear from our customers how grateful they are for the ongoing development to add new features and that we are so responsive to the changes thrust upon us by the constant movement in the technology landscape.
Thanks for considering intelli-CTi, whatever your final decision might be. I hope you find a solution that fits both your needs and your budget.
Dale Rolley
QGate Software