Hovus: Sorry, but didn't Avaya buy Nortel?"
Avaya didn't buy Nortel - just the division called Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES). Before this acquisition, Nortel was downsized from as many as 96000 employees to 10000 or fewer. From these numbers, one might assume that there could be a few people outside of Avaya potentially qualified to support Nortel phones.
Also, you should consider the main reason why Avaya acquired NES. I think it’s effectively clear that the reason was to get the NES customer base with the plan to convince as many customers as possible to migrate to Avaya switches and then kill Nortel products.
Right after Avaya’s acquisition of NES, many acquired employees were moved to IP Office. Only a small group was kept to maintain Nortel switches. Norstar and BCM are now discontinued - CS1000 is next on the list. If you decide to go with Avaya, the only longer term roadmap that you have seems to be the move to IP Office. On the other hand, E-MetroTel is trying to continue with Nortel’s “evergreen philosophy”.
PImoose indicates that the reuse of existing equipment and the ability to add more users are his top priorities. In that case, I’d say that UCx could indeed be a great choice. With UCx, he could reuse all the phones connected to the BCM50, the BCM50 itself (as UCx Digital Gateway) and BCM50 expansion modules and DSM MBM’s. To add more users, he could either keep adding Nortel/Avaya digital or IP phones or select from a wide variety of SIP phones. With Nortel/Avaya IP phones (which can use either UNISTIM or SIP firmware) and with other vendors’ SIP phones, the investment into new phones would be reasonably safe because these phones can be used with all telephone switches that support SIP clients.
Also, UCx does not require any additional licenses to use SIP trunks – the cost to sign up with a SIP trunk provider (e.g., VoIP.ms) and evaluate the option of using SIP trunks for external calls is minimal – the potential benefit could be huge savings on long distance charges.
Finally, the migration to UCx would be effectively seemless for end users - UCx supports many Norstar/BCM feaures and the phones can be configured to behave pretty much like on BCM.