Dirk

I would agree Avaya would win hands-down.. but am tired of hearing "IP telephony" this and that.. Another pet peeve is Avaya's insane BP policy.. sometimes they want customers to go direct.. other times indirect. Cisco does not play these sorts of games, which is refreshing. I think Cisco is likely run as a company much better than Avaya, but who knows. But Avaya can do IP using digital sets.. they can also do digital end to end.. you can blend your environments together with Avaya.. With Cisco, you must use Windows servers to run various applications.. it was designed by router-guys, it appears.. Cisco next year is going to Linux, copying Avaya and other vendors.

The difference between being paged all the time and rarely.. is Cisco vs Avaya. I know firsthand, again, people that use Cisco voice products.. they believe things like hold music and selectable .wav ringing supercedes reliability.. Sorry to trash Cisco, but during their last demo, they were so proud of getting hold music to work.. and call center features to work.. we just all laughed afterwards agreeing Cisco was not for us.

Cisco, at the rate they are going, might be better than Avaya in like 10 years.. who knows. They have made giant positive strides.. and with the way Avaya is being run into the ground as a company (my opinion), laying off all their local techs, allowing BPs to screw up installations, then clean them up afterwards as "maintenance..." this might be Cisco's saviour.. the fact that Avaya is not being run well as a company.. But perhaps Cisco is being run in the same manner, who knows. I think Cisco takes their customers for granted, at least on the data side. I can attest to this personally. If Cisco starts treating their voice customers the same way (arrogance).. then Cisco is done as far as the voice world goes. Avaya wants to "save" their customers $$$$ and Euros by selling them stuff.. it's quite funny. And Avaya's international presence just plain sucks. They are not at all a global company. Whereas Cisco is.

I guess in the end Avaya still wins, but I remember the good old days.. where Avaya did the cabling, installation, and servicing end to end. Perhaps that cost too many $$$.. but things were a lot better back then.