wildcattdw

Thank you all for the input. Very little of it was suprising. I have d/l the PowerPoint and will take a look at that a bit later.

A couple of opinions I'd like to voice. In response to Dirk....
"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.."

We are not a Cisco shop today. At all. We have a total of maybe a dozen Cisco devices in our data center, and those are mostly managed boxes, and we are not a small company by any means. You'd think Cisco would be trying very very hard to get our business, voice, data, wireless, anything, and I am yet to be impressed by my Ciso rep.

We also are very happy with our Avaya Business Partner. They are responsive and quite thorough. Now, we have become very self sufficent in the past few years (I have not had a tech, either Avaya or from my BP) on-site for probably 18 months, so I don't know about the current state of technicians in the area, but from past experience, they were always top shelf guys.

Gartner has consistantly rated Avaya in the Visionary quadrant in their Magic Quadrents for both IP Telephony/VoIP and telephony in general. IMHO, I don't see Avaya copying or following Cisco at all. I do think the release of AVVID was a wake up call for Avaya, and they had to do something, but they were well on their way even then towards the Server/Gateway structure.

That being said, I have been pushing numbers for weeks now. I have yet to find any 'beast' that the VoIP 'silver bullet' is going to take care of.
Toll by-pass between remote offices and main office?
The cost savings of Toll-bypass, CO line reductions, and even re-rating LD calls from switched CO lines to dedicated lines here (not to mention making most intra-state calling intra-state) doesn't even come close to paying for the additonal bandwidth required to handle the calls (many of our remote sites are 64K PIP)
MACs?
One Cisco sponsored study stated that Moves, Adds, and Changes cost the corporation $90 - $105. Are they nuts? We use TTI and have one person that moves as many as 30 people a day, and she doesn't make $100 a day.

If we were to do a greenfield install, then maybe save a few bucks on cabling...

My feelings are to stay the course and as we grow/upgrade, take advantage of what we can, otherwise, if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Tim