Which PBX to choose? Avaya or Cisco?

Hi,

We are a small business with 15 employees and are recently reviewing some offers to upgrade our old Panasonic PBX to a new one. We have 14 employees in our main branch and another employee in a remote branch. We have 2 very competitive offers from Avaya for IP Office 500 with 14 digital 5410 phones and 1 IP phone for the teleworker and the offer from Cisco includes 2811 router running Cisco Communications Manager Express (CME) with 15 IP phones model 7911. One of the things that bothers me with Avaya is that their solution is not pure IP and they don't support SIP phones (only SIP trunking). On the other hand, their solution seems to have more features than Cisco's (the free Phone Manager Lite software for example) and I heard they keep updating IP Office with new features in each version (version updates are also free).

I need some help making a decision here, please share your thoughts & experience...

Thanks in advance,

Danny

Reply to
Dan24
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What's wrong with your old Panasonic PBX?

Mike Schumann

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Reply to
Mike Schumann

No PRI support. Too much money to upgrade and no one will support it (distributor claims it's no longer supported and replacement parts are unavailable).

Reply to
Dan24

For an office that size, and with a small remote location, I'd look into a hosted VoIP solution from someone like M5 Networks:

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or Covad

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or Vonage

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Reply to
shadyrest

Hi Danny,

I th> Hi,

Reply to
Hongtian

A better question might be "What's wrong with Mitel?" - Why aren't they among your list? Might it interest you to learn that Mitel won a 'best of Interop' award this year (2008) in the VOIP and COllaboration category, beating out both Avaya and Cisco?

And yes, Mitel does make an ideal small business PBX in their 3300-CXi model.

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Reply to
Mitel Lurker <wdg

Our telephony uptime is extremely important and we can't afford to have it running on a windows server (not that there's anything wrong with Windows, just that from my experience computers crash more often than dedicated hardware). If you want a reliable solution running on Windows that also requires purchasing reliable hardware (with redundant components) and putting together the hardware+software cost would probably be too expensive. Besides, I prefer a company that manufactures both PBX and phones since that allows for usage of maximum features and interoperability.

Reply to
Dan24

All the more reason to consider MITEL. If you ever find yourself being forced onto a VOIP platform, there's nothing out there today more stable or bulletproof than a resilient Mitel MXe-3300. MITEL is also a legacy PBX manufacturer (not a marketing company like Cisco). MITEL has been designing PBX systems and telephones since the mid 1980s. The shit simply works. You couldn't ask for anything better.

- - - - - AND..... it doesn't run on MS Windows

in fact, the very newest MITEL 3300 Communications Director (MCD), presently in late beta trials, is running on a SUN SunFire X-4150 sever under Linux. If you're needing a phone system that you could launch into outer space and have it still working upon return to Earth, you've found it.

There's still plenty wrong with MS Windows. While I would have to agree that MS Windows has come a very long way in recent years, it still requires periodic reboots and *frequent* patch management. That's NOT where you ever want your phone system to be. If you're in the market for a dime store or duct tape phone system, there's plenty of them running on Windows, in all price ranges, from Asterisk to Microsoft OCS.

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Reply to
Mitel Lurker <wdg

On Jul 27, 4:02=A0pm, Mitel Lurker In article

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Hey Guys,

Just wanted to add (no offense) that in my opinon PBX is a out of date system. The phone system I have rad the most positive feedback of is GoHello. It is very user fiendly and the interface I can personally recommend. Look into this adress I you will find a free try out !

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Reply to
flesniewski

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