| We recently asked for tenders for a new IP telephony system (~3000 phones, with international branch offices managed and controled centrally). Currently we have a Nortel LAN and a Siemens PBX.
Nortel won, but I can say honestly that this had nothing to do with them already providing the LAN. They won mainly because of a nice price, but they were better technically than Cisco anyway in every aspect. Avaya found no partner to tender, which is sad because I think they would have ranked as good or better as Nortel on the technical part, although maybe a bit lower in features.
The problem with Cisco was: higher price (they own the market, they don't even need to make exceptionnal offers), poor flexibility in integrating with the LAN and many many little technical glitches that may not mean the end of the world when you look at them one by one, but that, when put together, draw a bad image of the whole solution. Siemens was completly unworthy of interest (Hipath 8000 based, too many missing features). |