Background
I got the idea for this blog after a series of posts on ILTA Connected Communities about VOIP product comparisons commenced while I was undergoing the investigations and evaluation of a new VOIP phone system myself for Rogers Townsend & Thomas. Here we go.
RTT has five offices and over 430 employees. Our existing phone system in the main office was end of life with the vendor. Although there are multiple offices within RTT, none of the phone systems are connected together due to limitations of the aging systems. There are separate phone systems and no inter-office dialing capabilities. It’s a long distance call between offices. Communication is a challenge at this level. With attorneys travelling across the nation for business and a small tribe of field workers, “single number reach” and phone over VPN capabilities were highly desired.
I can tell you that my firm is totally different than many of your firms out there with our business needs (see Part 2). So before the rants begin talking about the final selection, the blind statement of “ShoreTel is great” or “Cisco is great” isn’t really going to earn anyone anything. Both are solid solutions, but this wasn’t about them. This was about me finding the best fit for my firm, today. As mentioned, your needs will probably vary from mine. The “loser” in this deal may be a great solution for you or your ILTA buddy across the street. The decision was also based on information and system abilities as they are today in 2012 and not things to come or things promised. Information may change with either vendor in the future and if this decision was to be made a year from now, it may very well have ended up with a different outcome.
The VAR selection
Rather than selecting a product and then soliciting proposals from different vendors, I began the process selecting one just vendor who had the resources and experience to install any one of a dozen different VOIP systems. The rationale was that I would spend time focusing on serious conversations about business needs and workflows versus debunking marketing or sales FUD. Of course, I didn’t tell the selected vendor I was doing this. I let them bring ShoreTel and Cisco to the table with the specter looming that they still had to earn the business. (I came in third place at the Client Profiles Poker Tournament in Nashville last year for a reason). I now know with total certainty that my VAR totally understands what is needed on all levels of my business, regardless of what manufacturer was finally selected. All the bases would be covered and final implementation would be setup for success.
Where to start
Looking at the ILTA 2011 Technology Survey and you will see that 91% of the market share for VOIP telephony systems is spread amongst four vendors, in order of most to least, Cisco, Shortel, Avaya and Mitel. With regards to the expanding use of Microsoft Lync as a possible telephony solution I casually consulted with several Lync integrators. It was quickly ruled out for several reasons. First, as you will see later on, my telephony environment is a bit more complex than just providing dial tone for attorneys and staff. The challenge of bringing in this newer, less vetted technology along with the vast amounts of customization necessary to make things fit just showed the Lync was not the way to go for me at this time. Although I think Microsoft Lync will continue to grow and make great inroads in this area for law firms, I felt that I needed a telephony solution that was a little more mature on the sides of both product and support.
Why not Avaya or Mitel?
Mitel was the company that put my firm in this position to begin with, so there was no feeling of allegiance there. RTT had an aged InterTel phone system that Mitel had stopped supporting during their market share grab and overall InterTel debacle. Mitel phased out its own InterTel customer base in hopes of pushing them into new Mitel equipment. A self-fulfilling market share if you will.
Homie don’t play that.
Mitel just doesn’t have a good foot print in the legal sector which was a big negative. After talking to a VAR, Mitel wanted to focus the conversation about how inexpensive their offerings were versus other products even ShoreTel. Mitel virtualized their systems so you can run it on your own VMware infrastructure. The difference between them and Cisco is that Mitel wants you to run your phone system next to your servers on the same hardware cluster. Cisco runs VMware on their servers outside of your existing VM cluster. I am a big of a supporter of VMware. Yet, as rock solid as ESXi is, I have seen a VM cluster take a dump once or twice over the last few years. Rare, but it still happens. Can you imagine having production servers down and then not being able to call VMware for support as your phone system went down with the ship? Talk about putting all of your eggs in one casket (not a typo). So Mitel’s cost savings is selling you VM appliances to run on servers you already own. Once you talk about traditional hardware with them, which is still an option, those talking points go away. Mitel just doesn’t hold up in comparison to Cisco and ShoreTel with the out of box features. It even struggles with basic services such as voicemail, which should be second nature to any telephony product. However, it's a real problem within Mitel. Plus Mitel has pulled all of their local support resources and centralized support out of Ottawa, Canada. Need a local tech? Not going to happen. That didn’t sit well with me even after speaking with someone who has Mitel and said that their central operations were helpful. In Columbia, I can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a ShoreTel or Cisco VAR. In fact I had swing a Vice President from ShoreTel at a few of the other VAR’s in order to get a them to back off and not try to muscle in on a rival’s potential deal. Same team fellas!
Sidebar -Why would ShoreTel want their channel VAR’s to compete against each other where the only gain is a negative hit to the profit margin of the final sale? I would think that the risk of the battles that could possibly lead to collateral damage and loss of a potential customer would weigh heavy in ShoreTel’ s mind. This was a total unnecessary distraction and it continued all the way until the very end. Talk amongst yourself about that one.
Avaya. Searching the ILTA forums and you will find that David Michel and I are no fans of Avaya. We worked together at another firm when their aged Nortel system got replaced. Avaya was selected after due diligence research and interviews with firms using ShoreTel, Cisco and Avaya. Avaya was chosen by the Technology Committee after presentations by all three vendors. Cisco immediately took themselves out of the running on that bid with pricing and presentation. ShoreTel’s presentation just didn’t catch on.
At the beginning of the deployment, Avaya appeared to have a sound solution. That is, until the call processors and gateways began to just reboot themselves on their own during the middle of the day. This was less than 60 days out of the box. The problem took a few months to fix and the fix was in the form of alpha code from the R&D developers. Sleep tight on that one! Oh yeah, in the middle of this, one of the developers in Israel accidentally disabled the modem for one of the gateways. A local tech was dispatched to repair and we were sent a $500 service bill. We, of course, disputed that charge. Three months later, and less than 9 months after the new purchase of the phone system, Avaya sent that firm to a collections agency over the said $500 bill. Another three months of wrangling on top of that finally got that nonsense put to bed with a full written apology from Avaya. What a mess.
Reviews of Avaya’s public financial reports don’t paint them in a good light and may explain the iron fist approach for cash.
But wait, there’s more!
There was another “are you kidding me” news item that Avaya dropped on us. Avaya announced it had released a software upgrade and enhancement for their call processors. Huge advancements with SIP trunking was announced as a benefit of this upgrade. So I was contacted by the account rep. He was excited to talk about the upgrade as we were entitled to the software upgrade at no cost as a part of our annual maintenance agreement. I thought that we would only have to pay for engineer’s time, which is what I suspected the sales rep wanted to sell me on. WRONG!
You see the new software was not backwards compatible with “older” call processors. This new code required the newly released call processors in the system. In the Avaya world this is basically a new phone system core. Yep. That’s right. Avaya was releasing code and upgrades that many legacy customers, even those who were less than a year into their brand new systems, could not utilize unless they paid for a significant hardware upgrade. I had two choice words for Avaya and their VAR.
As my friend Frankenstein used to say while waving his arms back and forth, ”Avaya BAAAAD!” /rant.
The final two
If I had to place a bet at the beginning of this whole process, I would have said that RTT would probably select ShoreTel. The product is solid and the ILTA following is strong (second in reported market share only behind Cisco). Prior to this, I knew a lot about Cisco and their products from my work at past firms. I am openly harsh on Cisco. My commentary about Cisco for firms and companies my size is that with Cisco design and offerings, I am often too big to fall into their small business designs and too small to fall into their large business designs. There seems to be a blind spot that I just seem to hit with Cisco and some of their products. So did the ShoreTel prediction come true? Check out part two of the blog to find out.
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