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Cisco Versus the World
Succeeding with Cisco IP Telephony
from a Customer's Perspective
© Ted Wallingford 2003 - 2004

Table of Contents:

i. Background
1. Inability to perform overhead paging using Cisco SCCP phones.
2. Insecurity of Win32 platform on main Cisco softPBX imposes great overhead.
3. Meet-me paging applications are primitive.
4. Cisco's IP phones are too expensive.
5. Cisco's E911 responder servers add risk to a critical aspect of telephony.
6. The exclusively-distributed approach to telephony switching adds unnecessary failure points.
7. There's no program for 24x7 system monitoring provided by Cisco.
8. There's a hug feature gap between CallManager and CallManager Express, making large system design more difficult.
9. Cisco's legacy of non-support for 802.3af is hurting its customers in the long-term.
10. SIP endpoints can't be supported by the CallManager, making Cisco's softPBX a poor choice for service providers.
ii. Conclusion and Recommendations

 7. Cisco doesn't provide 24x7 system monitoring
With Cisco Call Manager's basis in Windows and its highly distributed feature architecture, it's surprising that Cisco doesn't offer a 24x7 monitoring hardline feature. Now, they do provide Cisco Security Agent, which is a proactive network monitoring tool, but it doesn't detect hardware faults and other things that only an onboard diagnostic can catch. Also, I think IT staff's time is better spent worrying about helpdesk support and business process issues than it would be spent combing CSA logs and monitoring the CallManager. Inasmuch as our enterprise telephone system will be at 10 different locations in three states within a year, this monitoring duty is practically a full-time job. This could be why a majority of Cisco AVVID users are Fortune 1000 companies or large educational institutions with lots of built-in CSA and IOS expertise.

Avaya offers a 24x7 monitoring program-a phone line “hard wired” to Avaya's customer service call center. It can pro-actively dispatch service technicians prior to actual failure when alarms occur on the soft switch. Avaya claims that this service catches 90% of failures and fixes them without the customer ever even knowing it. Somehow, this seems a bit far-fetched. But I digress. The service is pro-active, and this a place where Cisco trails behind.

This doesn't mean that Avaya's soft switch is immune to failure-but the monitoring facility does add an extra layer of resilience that Cisco hasn't been able to match. Cisco's service program, which is called “Smart NET,” has no such pro-active monitoring function. Cisco does offer service level agreements for Smart NET that allow for a minimum of a four-hour turnaround on replacement parts, however.

Cisco's Response: When pressed on the issue of pro-active monitoring, Cisco said that, if the VAR wants, they can monitor the switch themselves, and-of course- the customer should pay close attention to the Cisco Security Agent. Problem is, the VAR I spoke with, who is a Silver channel partner, has never set anything like this up. It doesn't speak well to the 5-nines service commitment Avaya, Nortel, and the other traditional players have been measuring up to for decades.