wildcattdw

I have an Avaya G3r with Definity Servers today, 3875 ports, ACM 1.2 at our main office. We also have half a dozen G3 systems in other locations. I have always planned that as we grew and made changes, we would continue down the Avaya path. Recently, however, I was asked to look at bringing in Cisco Call Manager boxes, as a comparison in both the long and short terms.

I am putting together pricing, along with my recommendation. I tend to be a bit biased, so I am asking for others opinions on which course is the 'best' course. I have cost figures, and am getting maintenance figures, but as we all know, there are other factors, like staff and employee knowledge on what we use today, and that both vendors have strong points and weak points.

I'd like to make sure my presentation covers all bases, and that I don't miss anything. I'd also like to know just how biased my opinion is. Any input is appreciated.

Tim

nexSIP

thats a lot of investment to just throw out. Just curious what was the reasoning to look at CCM?

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jsena

One thing that I heard while attending an Avaya session on this very subject was that the Cisco system needs a mesh network, whereas the Avaya system works on a star network. I don't know whether this is factual or not anymore. If it is, then it is quite the deal breaker for Cisco. The whole star versus mesh network is hard to explain without diagrams, but basically in a mesh network, you need a direct connection between every site, and you don't with a star network. Also Cisco isn't as feature-rich, espcially when you're talking call center. When I went to the Avaya session, Cisco had not implemented service observing yet (for example) -- I don't know if they have since. Also their phones only have 2 appearances, which may be a problem depending one the coverage you use.

I hope that this info isn't outdated -- I am definitely not trying to create FUD. Avaya's product is a lot more robust, and I can't imagine that if you already have a heavy Avaya infrastructure that it would make any sense to switch it to Cisco. For a new site, we might be talking about something different...

liquidvw

Looking at your origional post you have a G3R. So I take it you probably have a call center. The call center that cisco uses is the old geo tel system. It is no Avaya, to say the least. I recently sat in on the cisco network on wheels, where the cisco guys showed the latest gear. They were all impressed when they had some phones set up to hunt. WOW. I was not impressed. The cisco box is windows based. To me, windows is not a stable platform for a PBX. With the patches and reboots. Something like an anlog set on cisco is a chore. You need an analog to IP adapter to make this work. The administartion portion of the cisco box is all over the place. There is 100 different interfaces to make programming changes. everytime cisco adds some feature(purchase another company), they add another administrative interface. Maybe cisco will get there one day, but not yet. By the Definity has have may more years of stabality behind it. If your users are use to 100% up time, be prepared for less......

ahays

Avaya, the number one selling voice platform on the face of the planet, has a robust VoIP offering that integrates your legacy investment with the cutting edge of technology of tomorrow. Cisco is a fine company and the industry leader on the data side of the house. However, Cisco doesn't do VoIP any better than Avaya. This fact is undisputed by most everyone except Cisco. You must give considerable weight to the sizable investment you've already made in your industry-leading platform.

... And, do you have an Avaya call center with CMS? Call centers live and die on statistical reporting and Cisco has NOTHING comparable to CMS. Your call center executives and managers will be sending guys with crooked noses to pay you a visit following a Cisco migration.

However, it's likely that your organization has a CIO or IT Executive with a heavy data background and a hardon for Cisco. This is an all too common scenerio. I can point you to many die-hard Cisco IT Executives who firmly believe that Cisco makes the finest data hardware on the planet and would not even entertain the thought of another product in their data racks ... but who have also threatened to throw their Cisco representation out of the building if he mentions the word "voice" again.

Finally, I offer you this word of caution: Don't allow Cisco to perform their "dog and pony" show without also affording Avaya the exact same opportunity ... and TELL Avaya in advance that you're doing a head to head comparison with Cisco. That's only fair since Cisco will know in advance what they're attempting to displace. Cisco can be quite persuasive ... but I can tell you of more than one Cisco Call Manager that replaced an Avaya system and was ripped out a short time later.

This is not an easy prospect ... and the stakes are high. Tread lightly and employ due consideration.

regs,

.al.

__________________
Al Hays, ACE, MCSE, CCNA
Homepage: http://www.jeral.com/
Training: http://www.jeral.com/avaya-learning.html

PBXBear

I've worked as a Telecom Consultant and PM deploying both Cisco Call Managers and AVAYA (Lucent, AT&T...etc) systems and in my professional opinion - hands down AVAYA has the better product.

No matter what deployment or installation I've seen, I do not believe Cisco is five 9's. No matter what they say. In addition, advanced call center features (such as Advocate and AVAYA Virtual Routing...) can't be matched.

In theory, their products seem good. And their one big call center sell point - "Enterprise Queuing" - is no longer a stumbling block for AVAYA with the new "FaC" architecture ("Flatten and Consolidate").

The last place I worked had 2 Cisco Call Manager clusters, 1 Cisco IPCC Express, and 1 Cisco IPCC Enterprise - the amount of babysitting the systems required and the lack of true voice and contact center knowledge that Cisco has/had - made upper management want to kick the product out the door.

The only reason the product was kept around was to keep AVAYA in check - for whatever good that did.

Professional colleagues of mine have told me story after story of nightmare Cisco VoIP deployments and mainteance "overhauls".

The major question you need to ask - Do you consider voice a critical application in your enterprise/company/corporation?

If your answer is Yes - then you need to go with a vendor and product line that can ASSURE you five 9's.
If your answer is No - then feel free to experiment. Cisco, IPBX's, xPBXs, Nortel, Siemens...etc.

As an old boss once said to me: "If you can't bet your job on it, don't deploy it."

Additionally, as other have mentioned, the feature set can't be beat on Communication Manager / MultiVantage. And you gain a LOT of flexibility in terms of TDM, VoIP, IPT...etc...in comparison.

Just my opinion. Though, I might be jaded a bit after giving up countless evening and weekends applying patches, upgrades, .dot releases to Cisco Call Managers and IPCC.

Final point, unless Cisco finally released "Green Dragon" - it's still a Microsoft based platform... Need I say more. :-)

Regards,

Chris

PBXtech.info

 

ahays

Here's a Power Point presentation that might be of assistance ...


regs,

.al.

Attached Files

Avaya vs. Cisco comparison.zip (136.5 KB, 294 views)

__________________
Al Hays, ACE, MCSE, CCNA
Homepage: http://www.jeral.com/
Training: http://www.jeral.com/avaya-learning.html

PBXBear

Well Al, that was sure - strong. :-)

And I like it. Does anyone have an updated version? It seems about 1 1/2 years old?

-Chris

Dirk

Avaya is trying to copy Cisco and vice versa.. but Avaya wins hands-down.. Cisco will get there, but their answer=more servers.. that means more points of failure.

Avaya: the man who invented the 20-year light bulb went out of business.. Avaya is now realizing this.. and in my honest opinion, is sacrificing reliability for flexibility.. that being said, I know people that reboot their Cisco Call Center module daily.. for preventative maintenance.

Jim Cantwell

A good independent view was the January 2005 Business Communication Review Magazine of large scale PBXs. Here is a quote from the article.

“Avaya emerged as the clear winner in this year’s large IP PBX test, earning one of the highest scores we’ve ever recorded in our six years of testing these systems,” said Ed Mier, founder of Miercom. “Our comprehensive tests showed that Avaya’s IP telephony solutions deliver the highest levels of quality and reliability across the board, and received the top score in three of six criteria categories: architecture, features and endpoints. Avaya is at the top of its game, and we congratulate them on this win.”

Avaya was also came out on top in the March 2005 Network Computing VoIP systems evaluation of SIP interoperability

http://www.nwc.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1605f2

A quote from this article

"Avaya's IP Telephony Solution took our Editor's Choice award because it provided the best interoperability, comprehensive management tools and a ton of features for the price."

As you may be aware, Avaya is releasing Communication Manager 3.0 which will bring IP telephony to a new level. If you would like details on how the Avaya solution compares to the competition, I would need to know what is important to your business (call centers, mobility, functionality, security, resiliency, etc) and I can provide you details. I can be reached at cantwell@avaya.com or 786.331.0912.

Best regards

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.

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

Dirk

I respect that, but CM 2.2 is publicly known to be a "clean-up effort" on behalf of the BPs. Avaya is in fact copying some of Cisco's features, and vice versa (more Cisco copying Avaya). Even the interfaces are becoming similar to Cisco..

I would like to know who your BP is, if you don't mind. The place at which I work has over 300 systems for voice, most of them S87xx, S83xx, and G3sis. What frustrates me is Avaya wants us to buy directly at times.. and at others, indirectly. We bought Witness last year from Avaya directly, for example.. and that caused a 4-month delay because of their SAP process.. Locally, Avaya is down to 4 technicians, 3 of whom (as best I can tell) sit in a garage all day and surf the internet while the BPs do installations.. The best technician locally just got "bought out" and is going to work for a company called Source.. that's just one example. Since we have over 3,000+ Cisco switches, I think Cisco might treat us better.. they are anxious to get into the voice arena, but we're weary of them.. they are not there yet.. but based on their progress thus far, maybe after 10 more years, we'll see. Avaya is already there, but they are a pretty screwed-up company.. just ask a technician to be honest and you'll hear the whole story.

wildcattdw

We use Cross Telecom out of the Twin Cities, MN. We switched while still a named account, and still get very good support from our Avaya proper rep if/when we need him.

Dirk

We are migrating to Source because of the above tech and a few other reasons.. Cross has a great reputation, but is not available everywhere.. NACR has a great reputation and is #1 in sales.. they are based in MN if you care to know. Choosing is tough. None of them really do international, though.. challenging.