dw31220

We are currently a Cisco/Avaya shop who converted from two G3's to a Cisco CM solution within the last year. There was, is, and will more than likely continue to be a lot of pain with this transition.

We have also since deployed Avaya's S8300/8500/and 8710 series products at some of our larger remote sites.

Just like the previous post says, your voice people will need to know data and your data people will need to know voice. On top of this, thanks to Cisco's insistance on using windows, your voice people will also need to learn Windows server administration and things like SQL reporting procedures.

The two companies have a very different service model and you need to seriously look at them. Avaya is of the old school "rolling trucks" model and will typically send someone out if they cannot fix the system remotely. There is no pleasant way to get a Cisco technician to come out to your site if there is a catastrophic failure of your system (and by the time you do, it will more than likely be your replacement dealing with them).

Reliability is going to be an issue, although I suspect even Avaya will be dealing with some of those issues soon thanks to their decision to deploy on Server class hardware (with harddrives and fans, etc). We have already had a serious failure this year that resulted in a short service interruption followed by a long period of some failed features (until we got everything back to normal).

Analog with VOIP is a challenge for both vendors, but Avaya seems to provide the highest level of legacy compatibility. We only had to swap out one modem out of around 40 that just wouldn't work with the S8710. With Cisco, we couldn't ever get the modems to perform anywhere near as well.

With a Cisco solution, you are going to be spending at least one weekend every quarter doing patches, updates, or bug fixes. This is a reality. All of the Avaya stuff needed to be updated to fix some sort of problem, but they have been stable ever since the initial fixes were implemented.

Cisco only really offers a centralized call processing model. While they do provide SRST for remote site failover and even CME for smaller offices, your users will complain the minute the WAN goes down and some of their features just don't work. Avaya supports both Centralized and Distributed call processing. This means that for your smaller offices where you don't want to spend a fortune, you can go centralized and for your larger offices where features matter, you can go distributed. Not really an option with Cisco, you just have to beef up your data network to compensate.

Cisco's ACD (call center) functionality is an outrigger server (this means an additional point of failure). Their IPCC Express product is not really an option for larger call center environments and you need two servers to provide "warm-failover" capability (if you happen to be lucky enough to run a later version that supports a spare). Avaya's ACD is built into their Call Processing (which just happens to be redundant in the 8710 series product. The only outrigger is the CMS reporting server (and who cares if the reporting server goes down during the day) :)

Avaya can support native SIP handsets (which are much cheaper than Cisco or Avaya's IP sets). This allows you the choice to pick cheaper handsets that are still feature rich where it is a good fit. There are also a few really affordable SIP based wireless handsets (which are always cool).
Cisco is still stuck on Skinny (SCCP). This means you can expect to pay whatever they need you to for their phones (which in the case of their nifty wireless handset is like 500 bucks after discounts).

Cisco's Unity voicemail system is pretty cool, and a very powerful tool when fully utilized (faxing, Unified Messaging, Outpaging, call handling), but I've got users complaing even to this day that Avaya's Audix product was so much easier to use (and believe it or not, they don't care about all the fancy additional funcionality unity provides).


The Cisco Softphone is a better product that is much easier to install, configure, and operate than Avaya's which makes managing mobile users much easier.

Cisco's IP phone load process is much cleaner and secure (when using Cisco switches). Avaya could do a better job than what they've got now.


I guess I've rambled on enough. Feel free to contact me for more info.

-DW