On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Stefan Jafs <[email protected]> wrote: > We are looking at replacing our old Nortel BCM 450 for about 275 users.
Merely as an FYI, not a recommendation: We recently did a very similar migration (from a BCM 400), and went with Avaya's IP Office platform for one simple reason: It let us keep all our existing telephone sets. The IP Office has modules that support the Nortel M and T series sets (TCM digital). The IP 2000/1200/1100 series sets can allegedly be supported by loading SIP firmware on the set and treating them as SIP extensions. We prolly saved $20K-$30K in equipment costs this way. The IP Office itself still works a lot like an old-school phone system, and Avaya is absolutely an old-school phone equipment company (i.e., actively customer hostile), but our phone needs are pretty unsophisticated, so that doesn't bother us much. Besides, we were used to Nortel anyway[1]. We priced a Cisco replacement and it was going to be more than three times as expensive. Some of that was the vendor didn't have a way to provide features we needed without an IP phone, and so we would have had to do some re-wiring for stations which were fed by voice grade wiring[2] with CAT5, plus replace some non-PoE switches with PoE. They also said we needed a layered product to do paging through the sets. They also wanted to sell us lots of Cisco gear in general. Might be a more independent/creative vendor would have had better ideas; I dunno. In the past, I've also looked into Citel's Portico product (http://www.citel.com/products/portico-tva/), which is supposed to act as a gateway from Nortel TCM sets to SIP. Unfortunately, their channel sales organization was incompetent (at the time, anyway), and I couldn't get any information, a demo, or even a price quote. That was a few years ago, and as they're still in business, I have to assume they've fixed the problem by now. Might be worth looking into. -- Ben [1] Nortel = Like Avaya, but with a Canadian accent. [2] A single pair of wires, guaranteed to conduct electricity, and nothing more.
