Ian Dudley

I posted in December about some very serious problems we were having with Phone Manager and IPO, it's nearly two months on now and Avaya have got as far as admiting its a basic fault with the IPO, but have no fix. I said I'd update the forum on what happened so here's where we're at.

First off a bit of background to save finding the old thread.

We had a IP Office 412 with 2 20 channel VCM modules. We were also running CCC on a seperate PC.

The users were all on Phone Manager, i.e. a 100 percent softphone solution with no hardphones (other than a couple of meeting rooms). The network was bought to spec and comprised of 2x HP Procurve 2626 24 port QoS switches. (Before anyone says we were silly to go 100 pecent softphone, that would be fine if Avaya had told us up front it wouldn't work. But they didnt, they said it was a full commercial grade solution)

After going live we had several very serious problems, most notibly.

1. Cross connection. While on an existing call a user would suddenly be cross connected to someone elses outbound call. The person they were originaly talking to is cut off, as is the perosn who actualy made the outbound call. In one case someone outside the company dialled in to a pilot number, navigated through our voice menu as was delivered to a queue, then was connected to an outbound call to another client!

2. Calls dropping. User answers an inbound call, after 10 seconds the call just drops.

The above two issues were causing us to lose 30 percent of our calls when the system was busy.

3. Invalid ring tone. While on a call (can be inbound or outbound), the ring tone starts being played over the call. Both ends of the call can hear it and its loud enough to drown out conversation. The only way to end it is to terminate the call. There is no inbound call, when you hang up the system shows a missed call from the person you had been talking to. The only work around was to disable sounds altogether, which obviously is not a very good fix.

For a long time Avaya were unable to reproduce these issues and were insisting it was something to do with our setup. A Tier 4 engineer spent a few days here and could see it happening but not run it down. We eventualy lost patience and switched the whole IPO off and have since been running on an old Index with two IPC modules and Index IP softphone. This is not a great solution, but it works which is a big improvement over the IPO.

In the last week Avaya admitted that the softphone had never been properly load tested, i.e. with more than one or two users (so they lied when they said it was a tested business grade system). They have now put an exact copy of our setup in one of their own call centers and it did exactly the same things, thereby proving it's an inherant bug in IP Office.

They have told us that the VCM cards don't communicate properly which causes cross allocation of resources. Supporting this theory, we found the problems to be much less severe when we removed one of the VCM cards, but against it the problems were still there. There is also a suggestion that the VCM cards don't talk properly to the PRI card.

The other thing we have bene told is that when Phone Manager ends a call, the IP Office sometimes doesnt recognise it as finnished and leaves the channel open. Another call then comes along and is connected to the still open channel, which can trigger things to go weird.

All in all, the reported faults don't really add up when you examine them, but the basic point is that the IP Office does not work properly when used with Softphones. Avaya are saying to us it may not be fixed until the next major release in May.

For us the bottom line is pretty clear. Avaya lied to me (to my face in fact) when they said the proposed platform we were purchasing was a fully tested and business ready solution. It was in fact not fit for the purpose and we've ended up being beta testers for Avaya. They let this platform get to the market without ever properly testing it, which for a company thier size I find stagering. The issues we had were not minor ones that only occured now and again, we lost hundreds, if not thousands, of calls and at certain points nearly evey single call dropped.

Avaya have offered to kit us out with a set of IP hardphones for free, but frankly I'm not sure I trust them anymore and don't want to move to that solution only to find the same problems there. If they let it get to an end user without findinf such serious faults, who knows what else is in there?

There is also the matter that I was lied to during the tender process. We were also considering the Mitel 3300 platform. In fact it was my prefered system as it looks to be superior in nearly every way to the IPO. However, Mitel were quite up front that thier softphone wasn't ready for market yet. Since Avaya had told me their's was, we purchased Avaya purely on the strength of that one issue. So I am now very angry that Avaya are turning round and saying that we need to use hardphones to get it to work, as if we had been told that up front we'd never have bought Avaya in the first place.

Anyway, this has turned into something of a rant, for which I appologise, but the core fact here is that there are some very serious bugs in the IP Office and how it communicates with softphones. I'd advise anyone thinking of getting an IPO to insist on seeing a live demo of the exact configuration they want to buy, to make sure it actualy works.

cg111

I fully concur. I have seen many similar situations with Cisco Call Manager (Mangler) installs as well.
I wonder, where did your Avaya rep come from??

Always ask for references and call them all! (as Ian mentions above).......

IP Telephony is still new to many vendors. There are great success stories out there and many failures too.

Sorry to hear and almost feel your pain. The S8300 with all softphones would have worked flawlessly....

Regards........

__________________
ACE.....

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