About two years ago, DePaul University’s IT staff began plans to replace its Nortel 81 and Meridian Mail PBX communications systems that serve some 4,500 users at the university. Like many conversions, the shift to IP telephony (IPT) was designed to take several years and was going to be phased in by user-group. The new messaging system needed to provide interworking between the new IPT system and the legacy TDM PBX and it needed to provide full integration with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory. 

The staff decided on a Cisco solution (Call Manager and Unity) to provide telephony features, but after an initial pilot the team decided to use an Adomo Unified Messaging system to supply unified messaging. Since Cisco’s Unity platform includes unified messaging capabilities, we asked John Ourada, DePaul’s senior enterprise architect why the organization decided on a two-vendor approach. 

Ourada said: “We had to integrate tightly with Exchange and we found out that the Cisco Unity was built on an older platform and was complex and difficult to support. It was good, but it didn’t have all the architectural features that we needed and it required more modifications to ADS [Microsoft’s Active Directory Service].”

He continued, “We needed a system that tightly integrated with Nortel Meridian PBXs, Cisco Call Manager, and with Exchange and, while Unity could do that, we would have to make upgrades to [our] Nortel [infrastructure] that would have been very expensive.” He also commented that he was favorably impressed with the flexibility and quick response from a smaller company to provide him with the features he needed even if the features were on an existing roadmap. 

Our analysis: While it’s usually easier to introduce a single vendor solution rather than a multivendor one, IT teams will find this isn’t always the best solution. We look at a single vendor IPT solution as a “Swiss army knife” approach; it fits well together and is easy to carry as a single tool, but each individual blade isn’t always the “best-in-class” when compared to alternatives. The moral of the story: Make sure that IPT conversion plans include a hard look at both multivendor and single vendor solutions because even though a single vendor solution may have certain advantages, sometimes adding another supplier to the mix can both save money and make integration easier. 

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.