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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

 8. Cisco's remote-site/small-office PBX doesn't support a majority of
CallManager features
CallManager Express, the all-in-one small-office soft switch that Cisco makes as an entry-level PBX, doesn't support the full range of features that CallManager brings to the table. Express also does not support the same management tools or console applications as CallManager, which will make it more less uniform and more expensive to support than a comparable Avaya solution. In fairness to CM Express, it does have built-in voice mail, etc., and has less failure points than CallManager. It can also be centrally managed by a full CallManager solution when and if CM Express customers need to move up. Even so, there are traditional PBX systems half the cost of CM Express that have twice the features.

Cisco's response: A simple firmware change can cause the CM Express device to become a full CallManager-slaved media gateway. Now, and this is a fine point: Why, if Cisco can provide media gateway firmware for IOS to dump CM Express's dial-plan configuration and slave it to a CallManager, can't Cisco port CallManager itself to IOS? Now would be a good time to do it, too.