I have been down that path, we actually did purchase the Avaya IPO last year ( spent about $18k installed) and are currently doing a test with 15 phones, I have one of them, (9641G), I hate the phone, it's touch and you have to push very hard, way too many pushes to get to voice mail, when I dial a number I have to wait for it to time out before it dials, (this could be an issue with the trunking to the BCM), regardless installation took forever, (Bell Canada) the whole thing has left a bad impression of Avaya, also I have to played with their client one-X, but was not impressed at the demo stage.
So we have decided to go Lync or Cisco, this is more about communication than a phone system, their clients are booth future rich with: IM, Presence, Desktop Sharing, Conferencing. So that's why we are looking at a total switch away from Nortel / Avaya. So if anyone want to purchase used Nortel phones I'll have a bunch of Digital and IP phones available in a few months :). __________________________________ Stefan Jafs -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ben Scott Sent: March 30, 2014 11:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] How much to implement a Cisco telephone implementation 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.
