Good luck...
"...hold together" - until when? New budget available?
Today I was told that during the upgrade to Rel.9 we got 8 of the newest shelf controllers to compensate multiple downtimes caused by the problems last year.
Probably it didn't hurt them too much 'cause the upgrade was bundled with other orders (4th shelf, Uniphi stuff like IP trunk card, proxy, clients etc) and everybody knew th rumours about an upcoming project concerning CTI/IVR/CRM...
Something completely different: Aspect never was the cheapest offer when it comes to support contracts. But I think that there is a difference in what you get for the money since 1997. In the old days I was really impressed by their commitment to customer service. One day I called the hotline just to ask something about CustomView, and got an anouncement telling me that all their people were busy with other high priority cases and that I could leave a message, expect some a longer time in queue than usual or decide to signal an emergency, too. I dropped the call. Half an hour later I got a call from Aspect. The technician told me that he saw that I was in their queue and asked if he could me in any way. I was really surprised and delighted

Times have changed, business has changed and everybody has to save its money wherever it is possible.
But I don't like to be promised that heaven would come to earth if we just ordered the next release. Not when I can't get any info on what caused our problems in detail and how it is fixed.
Tonight some paddle boards and probably the new shelf are going to be replaced.
But our box couldn't hold together until evening. When the bells rang noontime no more incoming calls where accepted, but no problem with outgoing calls. Same problem with the ISDN-stack (Trillium) like a year ago when we were on 8.3.
Murphy seems to have a very good time now...