RKD

Does anyone have any recent info on Avaya IP Vs. Cisco IP. I want to know the "gotcha's", the things they are not going to tell me unless I sepcifically ask.
We currently have a G3 at our corproate headquarters, our satelite locations are all small stand alone non-avaya systems. We want to investigate IP to our remote locations and are evaluating Ayvaya's and Cisco's solution. I am looking for pros / cons for both providers.

cascadia

I just went through this for my company, and we ended up going with an Avaya IP Office 412 system. My company is in the financial services business, so they are highly dependant on phones and internet/email. For this reason I wanted something that was rock solid and would not crash/reboot/be offline ever. We also considered the Nortal BCM, but ultimately went with Avaya for a reliable solution. The BCM and IPO are more on part for sizing, while the Cisco can scale a lot larger. Note these settings are per site, not nation/system wide limits. I suggest you talk to NetVersant about IPO and Nortel, and engage Cisco to show you their system. Both look great. I can tell you law firms spend a lot of money on IT and they use Cisco, while a lot of more moderately budgeted firms buy something else. Choose the right size/scale/solution for your company. Below are some of my Pros/Cons for both systems, and why I went Avaya.

Avaya Pros:

1. DTM Phones on the desk (solid phone quality in office)
2. IP softphones/hardphones for remote offices, specific users, or road warriors.
3. Simple conference bridge integrated (people dial a number, enter a pin, and you join a conference)
4. Can use 4 PRIs all within the system
5. Cheaper by far. Our IPO412, 90ports, 8analog, 60 handsets, with install, was roughly 48k

Avaya Cons:

1. No video conferencing
2. Not SIP based
3. phone extension limit (I think either 200 or 300)

Cisco Pros:

1. Virtually unlimited number of phones
2. great desktop software
3. tandemburg video conferencing
4. Fancy looking phones

Cisco Cons:

1. Phone LCDs are hard to read in various light settings and don't alert users very well while on a call
2. Nearly impossible to use 1 system for 2 seperate organizations
3. PoE can be expensive, in order to have centralized power
4. All phones are required to boot, hence have a delay before being usable
5. Servers run Win2000 not 2003 and use Cisco Security Agent
6. Requires more servers than 1 for voicemail
7. Requires VoIP QoS on all ports to keep quality high
8. If you seperate voice and data switches for reliability, your cost just went through the roof.

PBXtech.info

 

OctelWarrior

I don't know man. The 5200 series DTE phones look pretty sweet. Their 4600 IP series is also sweet. I like them better than the Cisco phones. CM3 has video conferencing. JINKIES!

I'm actually certified on both the Cicso and Avaya solutions (certified about 6 months ago, a lot has changed since then)

Cisco had a really nice bundle... that wasn't very feature rich. You get a switch, add a couple modules and you have a router, switch, PBX and VM all in two 3u boxes. The cool thing is they could act as LSPs (I forget what the cisco term for LSP is) the bad thing is that the small office VM solution was very limited in what it could do. Inexpensive, quick, has the Cisco name all over it.

Avaya's going to design their plan a few different ways depending on the size of the branch office. IPOffice is nice, very inexpensive, has Excellent features. This is a complete seperate phone system though, no centralized administration.

You could go to S series platforms, making them LSPs. More expensive, centralized admin, excellent IP trunking and one system to license.

It really comes down to the application. For some companies VoIP doesn't fit their business. I would really suggest going over your business model with some sales and design people to find the right fit.



as to the 'gotchas'... when you go into your design meeting make sure to bring up EVERYTHING. Every application you have, every type of device you have plugged in and every customization you have made. Some things just aren't compatable, not everything has been tested and thought of. Make sure you bring everything up so your future product is guaranteed to work as expected.

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Peronally I'd rather lose phone access than data.

roar

If you already have a Avaya G3 system in place the best route may be to upgrade the equipment. Cisco requires a complete system replacement and in some ways a rethinking of your telephony strategy. Converging voice and data can be a money saver if you plan to revamp the data network anyway and if your current wiring will support IP (Cat 5 or better) but if you are not planning on this you may run into a few gotta's.

The advantage of the Avaya solution is that Avaya is a hybrid system that can support both IP and traditional analog and TDM. Cisco in essence demands that you move fully into the IP world. If you determine that pure IP is the solution then the Cisco solution will probably be very cost competitive and if you pick the right vendor to install it will work well for most solutions. Look at the bigger picture and determine if a pure IP solution is what you need and evaluate the total costs of replacement.

Things to consider;

1. In place wiring plant, is it Cat 5 or better and does it terminate in a patch panel or 110/66 type hardware, (if it terminates in 110 or 66 you may see more expense to convert to a patch panel).

2. Does your IT department have the technical skills to support a converged network. This means they need to have a strong skill set in QoS (this is an issue if you go with Cisco or an Avaya IP solution).

3. Do your IT and Telecom departments work well together, if not you will have issues.

4. Is your current data network good enough to support VoIP, bandwidth and QoS issues need to be considered at the initial planning stages.

5. Do you have a lot of analog or TDM device requirements or older equipment that interfaces with the PBX. Converting these systems from dealing with a traditional PBX to an IP solution must be considered in evaluating total costs.

6. If you have a intense call center application the Avaya solution is more mature and has more bells and whistles but if not the call center solution in Cisco may be more that sufficient.

Either way you go the one big advantage is converting the satellite offices to gateways off the main site. This allows you to manage all the remote sites as if they are one big system. This unifies the management and user experience. If you have good reliable WAN links in place this can be a real benefit. (Make sure you go with a survivable option at the remote sites however, because no matter what your network provider says the links to the remote sites will go down and you need a strong solution in place to make sure these remote sites stay up an running with phone service.)

In an earlier post someone suggest using the IP Office but if you decide to stay with Avaya look at using the Enterprise gateways such as the G350 or G700/S8300. The IP office is not as mature a product as the G3 and has a different software so much of the experience you have in managing the G3 system will not translate well.

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

ten8ous1

There are several variables to consider. How large are your main sites.

Do you have a uniform dial plan amoungst sites.
Avaya and Cisco have unique ways of handling conflicting dial plans in my opinion. Both are less than innovative in that aspect.

Are you looking ofr enterprise wide licensing and administration. If so once again they both offer it however each not without caveats.

Cisco SRST provides basic telephony in the event of a failure.
Avaya LSP's have the leg up in this aspect.

I have a ton of things I could point you to look at but without understanding your goals they are just shots in the dark.

If you want to continue the discussion just expand on your requirements.

Cheers-

__________________
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein

PBXtech.info

 

stevena

This Just In: Cisco's new CM 5.0 will support SIP telephones.

mexitaco

I am also looking to implement VoIP in a remote office and we have a G3 in our corporate office. The remote office needs to have a survivable setup including redundant links back to the corporate office. We need to support about 80 office workers in the remote site. The typical WAN connection we would put in for a facility like this would be a 768Kbps Frame circuit but we are considering MPLS for this location instead.

We have a good relationship with Cisco and Avaya both.

Does anyone know if Gartner has published a magic quadrant on Voip?

Phone dude

THIS JUST IN. Avaya 4.0 will support SIP.

penelope

This is a comparison I received from my Avaya rep. It's the newest one that I have seen.

Attached Files

Nemertes_issue_paper-VOIP_Business_Case.pdf (212.6 KB, 97 views)

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Penelope

jechoi

Does anyone have the latest pros and cons of IP telephony systems for Cisco, Nortel and Avaya systems? Features, stability, etc.