IP Telephony - 600 handsets

blueboy2001

blueboy2001

blueboy2001

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I need to replace a 3Com VCX 7000 IP telephony system in the next few months. It's a good system, but it's no longer properly supported by HP who dropped it after the 3Com takeover.

We've got about 600 handsets but due to the proprietary way these download their OS from the server on boot my understanding is that they can't be used with anything else.

Where should I be looking? We need something with HA/redundancy, it must be reliable, easy to configure and just work - I don't want something that needs a lot of tinkering with. The 3Com is often left for months with no attention and it's fine.

Lync Enterprise Voice has been mentioned, but that's a bit up in the air at the moment with the move to Skype for Business.

Cisco is an obvious one, and I'm seeing a supplier offering Shoretel next week.
 
Love Shoretel. It's SUPER easy to manage and the way they build redundancy is really slick. If you're running multiple sites it's really nicely done too. If you want a system which is "set and forget" and that just works then Shoretel is your friend.

If you want massively powerful then I love Cisco voice kit. Administering it is an artform, you probably want to make sure you include training in your proposal if you go this route. You'll also need deep pockets but it's the most solid and powerful system out there IMO.

Mitel is worth a look too, possibly Avaya but I've never been hugely keen on them.

Any contact centre requirements?
 
We've currently got Macfarlane for our small 30 seat contact centre, but if a single solution could do that we would make a significant saving on support.

Contact centre needs are pretty basic - multiple queues, call recording, recorded message out of hours and a couple of wallboards, plus reporting functionality.

My only concern with Shoretel at the moment is Mitel keep trying to buy them! I don't want to get into the situation we've been in with 3Com where we have a decent system that meets all our needs but has been dumped due to a takeover leaving us with a forklift upgrade.

I'm not bothered about having to replace the servers after 7 years, it's binning 600 perfectly good handsets that grates, especially because our users like them because they're simple and easy to use. The biggest problem when we went from an analogue system to the 3Com was training the users, some of whom are extremely resistant to change!

Are Shoretel handsets fully SIP compliant - ie could they be used with another VoIP system? For the reasons above I'm loathed to buy proprietary handsets again.
 
The Shoretel contact center stuff (as well as presence, IM and voicemail) is baked in (just a license for the agents and supervisors) so you dont need any extra software or hardware, which is good.

Cisco's is CUCX which is OK and presence/voicemail are separate systems so it can get quite complicated. You'd probably be looking at the Business Edition 6000 which is a Cisco rackmount server with ESXi and all the different servers installed. I've used Zeacom (http://www.zeacom.com/) with Cisco systems before, as a one box to handle IM, Presence, contact center and operator consoles it's pretty nice and more cost effective than Cisco's own offerings.

I wouldn't be too worried about Mitel, Shoretel are gaining enough ground that the product will be around for years. It's quite different architecturally to Mitel's so it might get a rebrand but it wont go away.

The point about the phones is a tricky one - almost all systems have features that you need their phones in order to use. Directories, presence, extension reassignment etc. You could use standard SIP phones with any of these systems but you'd lose a lot of functionality. The Shoretel phones are SIP (The 400 series only) but I dont know if they're locked down to the extent where they wont work with other systems. If longevity and interoperability are a concern then go Cisco - their phones play nice with other systems and they're going to be doing voice until the end of time.
 
Sub it out to someone else and get Cisco handsets, and make it not your problem. You don't want to be "the phone guy".

If you want something you run yourself then you need to give up a bit of ground on your idea of non-proprietary handsets - as much as SIP is a standard, if you want anything other than the most basic calling features then you're into the world of proprietary extensions and that means matching the endpoints to the call server. With 600 endpoints you definitely want provisioning to happen automatically, and this is tricky if you're trying to do a mix and match approach to the phones. The best you'd manage would be Polycom handsets and a Broadsoft-based PBX - or rolling your own provisioning platform based off Asterisk (don't do this). Polycom are a good choice here because they don't have a PBX product, publish very detailed administration guides making it very easy for third parties to use all the features the endpoints support, and are high quality devices.

One interesting player that I found were IPCortex who claim compatibility with tons of different handsets, including provisioning and advanced features such as hot desking, but they pushed me to a partner to get pricing and that partner kept ignoring what I was asking for and tried to sell me new handsets on a monthly contract so I never got to the point of trying the product out.
 
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Don't worry about the Skype for Business stuff, it's essentially a re-brand nothing more. Very little functional difference certainly in the telephony space.

From a price point Lync won't compete with pure phones on desks, but add in all the other stuff it could be worth it - I certainly think so, spend pretty much every day doing it!

Cisco UCM is the most flexible - a brilliant platform. Comes at a price though, both monetary and education to manage.
 
Cisco if you are using it as a back office solution (we use 7961's) and Avaya if you are using ACD features (we use 9650's) :)
 
Exponential-e.

They're our ISP too and we have a Gig circuit VPLS connection with them. The phones take 3Mbps per 50 users.
 
That's interesting, I had no idea Expo offered Broadcloud.

Are your handsets all bounced off the Polycom Zero Touch provisioning platform and then registered with Expo-e as remote extensions, or do you have VPNs in place?
 
No VPN's.

All phones are PoE, powered by our switch stack, all on a VLAN that goes upstream and as you say, registers with the platform.

All managed by a web browser portal.

Mobile users all have a SIPhone app that registers directly with the platform.

Cheap, reliable and easy to manage.
 
Excellent, did you have to do much in the way of firewall configuration to get the handsets to work, or just the usual QoS stuff and outbound rules?

Been looking around and the combination of BroadCloud + Polycom seems unbeatable if you don't want Cisco or some amateur effort with terrible endpoints in terms of design and hardware quality. I assume you're on VVX 400s and up?

Edit: Ignore the firewall stuff, just saw the VPLS reference in your post.
 
No problem.

We've very much put our eggs in one basket, our break out point for internet is Expo's Fortigate centralised firewall, so we did our own rules for that, and for our VDC areas but the phone integration is all seamless; QoS is all handled by them.

We have a mixture of VVX410's and IP335 handsets, and we've got UC licenses activated on PC's as well.
 
We use Swyx at work for approx 100 users, but don't believe it would have any problems scaling to 600 or more. Incredible easy to manage as windows based drag and drop.
 
I hope you don't mind me hijacking the thread.

we're looking at something similar for around 100 users. would love some thoughts on Horizon - Gamma as I believe it also run's on Broadsoft.

I considered Expo E but was worried about putting all my eggs in one basket when using them as our ISP.
 
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