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

[lelio at uoguelph.ca]

I would agree. While we were going through the migration phase there was a
strong Cisco presence. Unfortunately, we've seen that presence wane now that we
are fully deployed. Unless of course, we start talking about buying a new
product... ;)

We've picked up quite a bit of experience from the migration, so our requests
now have become quite a bit more complicated and are more design related, which
may be at the root of the problem, however, sometimes, we just need a pointer in
the right direction.

We've (or I've) been getting much of that from this list where I once got that
from our SE team pointing us to different internal Cisco resources via
conference call, etc.

I like reading documentation like everyone, and expect that I have to do my
part, but a half hour discussion with a knowledgable rep can give you a
headstart that no documentation can.



Quoting Steve G <stephengustafson at gmail.com>:

> 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
>