As an IT Supervisor with a 2000+ port Avaya s8700 VoIP distributed architecture (over 50 sites), I'd be very wary of what Avaya is espousing concerning their product line.

Re: The real strength of Avaya's IP Telephony system, Part 1.

As a recent recipient of 2 sub-par Avaya products (Modular Messaging voice mail and s6100 Conference Bridge), the products have not met our expectations and promises made by their over-confident sales/marketing staff. Integration with email/calendering products is focused on Microsoft Exchange shops (they told us after the fact that 85-90% of their business customers are MS Exchange environments while only 5-7% of their customers are Lotus Notes environments... you can do the math yourself to determine where their support concentration is). Their focus is obviously in the Exchange environment for integration and as with their other products, the Avaya support system is broken under their new 'around the globe' or 'follow the Sun' support. I'm very leary about anything Avaya markets and I caution any of your readers to analyze the market thoroughly before jumping into the Avaya World (and those that are in the Avaya World already). We've started and in-depth industry analysis of phone PBX systems.

An up and coming competitor to the Avaya/Cisco/Nortel branding is Shoretel. We've been extremely impressed with their product line and their support pricing cannot be touched by the 'big 3'. In a recent pilot by our company, my team was able to install, configure, and operate a Shortel VoIP system within 1.5 days...and it's running along side our Avaya system flawlessly with more features and administration tools available than what the archaic Avaya O/S provides. Businesses need to clearly understand the Avaya support model as well. Avaya is considered an anti-competitive company when it comes to performing maintenance. They claim that if anyone other than themselves or one of thier 'authorized business partners' performs maintenance on the system you own and operate, they're in violation of Avaya's software RTU...be extremely cautious of this since with such restrictive maintenance policies they have a noose around your maintenance budget. If you're looking for controlling (or reducing costs) and minimizing the administrative overhead of your IT staff, look away from Avaya. They continue to cluge their TDM systems into VoIP technology and they're products are put to market while still in beta (at best). You'll find this out when calling for support.

I'd be very interested in seeing an in-depth review article in Network World with the Shortel product...I think your readers will be pleasantly surprised about a very viable product option other than the Avaya/Cisco/Nortel lines.

Respectfully,

A long time Avaya Customer ready to move away from the strong arm tactics of an overgrown, unresponsive, lethargic and, at times, over-confident Beast.