[VoiceOps] Seeking phone system recommendations

[Graham Freeman]

Hi, folks,

Can you recommend a managed telephony vendor?

Client characteristics:
* Several locations in the US, in multiple states.
* Total of a few hundred seats.
* High tens or low hundreds of thousands of minutes.
* Prefer to trunk to vendor via existing reliable multi-hundred-megabit and/or gigabit internet connections. Dedicated link is a possibility if necessary.
* Ideal to continue using existing Polycom SIP phones.
* Vendor should have monitoring that is as proactive as possible.  SIP packet loss?  Call drops?  Call completion failing?  Low MOS scores?  To the extent technically and commercially feasible (IMO, it's feasible), vendor should be the first to notify client about these issues and path/timeline to resolution, instead of waiting for client to complain.
* Operator panel that is at least as capable as Shoretel Communicator (version 13).   Ideally modern HTML5 web-based, not based on ancient vulnerable tech (such as Flash or Java).

Client has a good IT team, including folks with telecom experience, but would rather have a managed telephony vendor instead of staffing up more telecom expertise internally.   Client prefers to handle end-user tier-1 (and sometimes tier-2) helpdesk issues internally, and have in-house IT/telecom staff talk to telephony vendor about any issues that can't be handled internally.  (In other words, this is a great client for a telephony vendor that can build and maintain a reliable and properly monitored telephony infrastructure.)

Client is accustomed to deploying phones with LLDP-MED, putting phones on a separate voice VLAN with a vendor-managed router handling that VLAN.

Client would love to see provisioning (e.g. new phone) and management (e.g. password resets) as automated as possible.  Current vendor has a very manual (and time-intensive and error-prone) process.

If you respond via email off-list, I'll summarize the responses on-list in a few days.   (Please, don't call or text me about this unless we've made an appointment to discuss.)

thanks,

Graham Freeman, Principal Nerd
NerdVentures.com
graham at nerdventures.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamfreeman
Twitter: @get_nerdy