[cisco-voip] RE: Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment

Sun May 29 12:52:30 EDT 2005

Its kind of funny as I follow this thread. I am in EXACTLY the same
situation right now. Except we are small shop with big needs. We are
moving, have an old Norstar system that has been very reliable and
currently entertaining bids from Nortel and Cisco for a VOIP system.
Cisco has broken their backs to get our business while Nortel is more
interested in talking bad about Cisco. Cisco is currently in a major
lead for the very reasons you say below. I get the sense that Nortel
could care less.

It also seems to me that there are more 3rd party products readily
available for Cisco systems than there are Nortel. Maybe I am wrong and
its just another point that Nortel hasn't let us know about.

________________________________

From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Steve G
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 8:51 AM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: [cisco-voip] RE: Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment

Thanks for the reply Lelio.  Today we are a Nortel PBX shop, so Nortel
is deffinatly a player.  Perhaps the largest + that Cisco has going for
them is
their presence on a weekly bassis.  By making hardware readilly
available and coming on site every week to help with LAB and design puts
them
 way ahead.  I can't remember the last time a Nortel Rep was at our
location to see how they can sell us products in the future.  Cisco may
not be
 the absolute best in any 1 area, but they will support the heck out of
their products.  At least that is my experience.

Steve

________________________________

Overall I have been impressed with Cisco CallManager and Unity. There
have been things which I have not been pleased with, but let's be
serious, every vendor/product has their weaknesses. If you are migrating
from an existing solution to a new solution, then I would strongly
suggest evaluating what your current system can do now and what the
proposed system can do very carefully. Take promises of features with a
grain of salt and don't expect those to come to fruition any time soon -
plan on deploying what you can see in front of you. And don't
underestimate the importance of any one feature - or in our case any one
person that might be using that feature. ;) 

There are many features that are common place in other PBXs that for
some reason are not in the Cisco product, e.g. forwarding from secondary
lines and PLARs, and require additional steps and or programming to make
things work. In the case of forwarding secondary lines they will point
you to the user's phone configuration web page - since there is a
solution, there has been little effort to including that as a feature.
In the case of a PLAR, you have to create a special class of service for
that phone which only contains one dialable pattern - a lot of work if
you have a lot of PLARs with different destinations. Other systems have
a dialdown field parameter. In actuality, many of the features you might
need require seperate classes of service definitions to make them work.
That's one of the things that I don't like. Not scalable in my opinion.

The other thing I've found difficult to deal with is the lack of
documented changes in the upgrade cycle. There are some documented
changes but many are missing. Phone upgrades in particular seem to
change quite a bit of the asthetics of the phone without any sort of
documentation whatsoever! Enterprise and System Parameter changes are
not documented in new releases so you have to sort through them to see
what might be missing or added - with over 300 of them, it is time
consuming. 

Your deployment is similar to ours, except ours is a central campus with
~7500 phones. We've deployed 6 servers - publisher, TFTPserver and four
subscribers, two each for our distinct groups - business and residence.
An upgrade can take the better part of the whole day.

I'm sure others will join in in the discussion..... ;)

-----
-----
Lelio Fulgenzi, B.A.                                  lelio at
uoguelph.ca.eh <https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip> 
Network Analyst (CCS)
University of Guelph                             FAX:(519) 767-1060 JNHN
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1                          TEL:(519) 824-4120
x56354
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^
mob lawyer: your people insulted my brother.
dr. house: what? romano in the parmesan cheese shaker again?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Steve G 
  To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
<https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip>  
  Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:24 PM
  Subject: [cisco-voip] Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment

  Hi Again,
       Does anyone have experience with comparing Nortel's VoIP
solutions with Cisco's?  I am currently evaluating the two beasts and so
far have only got my hands on Cisco's CCM 4.0(1) and a Unity Server.  I
must say they are pretty slick products.  I have no experience with
Nortel equipment as of yet, and would like to know if there are any
caveats to either one that would rule it out of the comparison. 

  Background:
  Deployment size will be 10,000+ phones at the end of the project.
  All Cisco Data network is existing.
  40 WAN locations (Frame Relay) would talk to a Centralized CP and have
SRST enabled routers.

  Any help would be great.  +s and -s of the two products would be
appreciated.

  Steve
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