Ring Central and Avaya 9

[BernPed]

I understand that Avaya has a platform on Ring Central. I have heard a lot of customer service and QOS complains about Ring Central over the last few years.

I have even restored clients that use to use the IPO 500 and went to R.S. and asked to be restored back to the old reliable IPO with either PRi or analog service.

What have you hear?

 

[hibroth]

For what I know and I heard the Avaya Cloud Office has been a big sales fail here in the EMEA area, Ring central proposed exactly the same solution with different GUI to Alcatel and Unify/Mitel, the sales model is not pertinent with the EMEA market, additionally I heard too about complainings about customer service due to failures or bugs.

 

[BernPed]

For example I just got a call from a assisted living center that switched to FIOS when that happened their entire VOIP went down. Manager called their of course out of town call center support and was told we only provide the phones and the service and you are responsible for all the rest. The property had been sold and they have no idea who installed the VOIP.

I was referred to them by a friend that works for Cox filed repair. I told the customer I would only install a traditional PRI based Avaya no VOIP.

They have been renting that VOIP for about 7 years and have now spent over $25,500.00 to date for rental fees vs a one tie purchase of an Avaya with about 8 handsets for only a few thousand.

Everyone and their mother seems to be selling telephone service these days.

 

[ACSscott]

I personally have had a very different experience, at least on the technology side, with RingCentral.
We switched from our on-prem IPO to RingCentral for our company five years ago and it has been great. Call quality is always perfect if you have good internet and we experienced a single one hour voice outage in that entire five years. The desk phones work fine. The apps are the best in the industry in my opinion. They are constantly adding good features with AI, etc. I have about 50 customers ranging from one user to a thousand users on RingCentral and I have never had any cancel except for one lawyer who retired. They are all happy with the service.
One caveat - you need to learn the programming yourself. Their support is overseas and bad. Their "professional services" is bad. It is a very intuitive system.

I have a few customers using ACO. It works the same because it is the same for the most part, and shockingly the Avaya support has improved drastically over the past few years and is now better than RingCentral's support.

There ARE things you can do on IPO that you cannot do on RingCentral. Like buttons on physical phones to log in and out of hunt groups, set night service, getting granular with shortcodes for restricting calls, etc. But for the uptime and app quality, I think it can't be beaten.

 

[derfloh]

As we talked about shortly

 

[biv343]

I have minimal experience with either Ring Central/ACO, but the admin side looks fairly intuitive. All I can offer, based off Avaya's cloud strategy being all over the board over the past decade and their tendency to EOL cloud offerings on a whim, is why not go right to Ring Central and skip ACO? The only compelling reason I could think of to go with ACO is if you had a lot of analog devices that need to keep working - I don't know that a 500V2 can be connected to Ring Central, but it can be connected to ACO.

 

[ACSscott]

biv343 - I had no idea you could use a 500v2 as an analog gateway for ACO. Great info, I'm looking into that right now.

derfloh - We did discuss that briefly!! Also you are the MAN!

BernPed - Something was sticking in my craw about your post where you said you'd only put in an on prem with PRI for the assisted living center. I just wanted to point out that $25k over 7 years is exactly what a $300/month PRI would cost. So it doesn't seem like they were overpaying by all that much with their VoIP service compared to the monthly cost of a PRI. Break that all the way down per user per month for a VoIP service, which I did, it was just priced too high per user. A properly priced VoIP service with 8 users is almost always going to be a better deal than an on prem with PRI.

 

[derfloh]

derfloh - We did discuss that briefly!! Also you are the MAN!

Am I?
I read about the option to add either IP500 or Avaya IP DECT to ACO. But tbh I didn’t follow the status and don’t know that much about it. I also don’t know what you can do with IP500 connected to ACO. Using it to connect hard phones? To connect Wetter trunks like analog or ISDN? Anything else?

 

[telecomtekperson]

IP500 can be a high capacity ATA: https://documentation.avaya.com/bundle/IPOfficeACOGateway/page/IP_Office_as_an_ACO_Gateway.html
Survivability should come by q2, but that been promised for years...

If you are tricky, you could create a SIP line in IPO, register an ACO user in the UID of the trunk, and have a tie trunk form IPO to ACO...will need to be creative after 11.0 as they prevent the registration of a SIP trunk to sip.ringcentral.com, but ypu can create offline config and push to IPO blah blah..