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

When it comes to telephony, Cisco is moving in the direction of the traditional players like Avaya and Nortel; those vendors aren't moving in Cisco's direction. What this tells me is that Avaya and Nortel are a lot closer to the goal of replicating the elegance and reliability of traditional telephony on VoIP than Cisco is.

When making a decision about a communications system, the bottom line for implementers must be a median between features and standards support. Right now, and conceivably for few years to come, Cisco is behind on both. That's why it's frustrating to hear Cisco's otherwise excellent pre-sale engineers out in the field touting that Cisco beats the competition in features, standards, tech support, and design philosophy. None of these claims is verifiably true. Some of them are verifiably untrue. Yet, this is the Cisco Pitch.

I've even had a certified Cisco engineer tell me that Avaya's softPBX “can't use IP phones.” Now, a certain amount of inaccuracy is forgivable, but such a blatant misstatement about a competitor is certain born out of FUD.

Cisco's field people quote Miercom studies that favor Cisco without mentioning that Miercom has a history of Cisco-favorable research that goes back five years. And even if the average implementer gave much credence to hired research, what about Cisco's lagging behind Avaya and Nortel on voice features and stability? Or Cisco's stubbornly short-sighted choice of Windows NT for the CallManager?

An obvious way out of these problems is: Don't use Cisco AVVID/CallManager; instead opt for another softPBX vendor's solution. But in situations where a Cisco choice is necessitated by politics, which is quite common with Cisco's very long reseller reach and discounting power, it's important that every precaution be taken to get an honest representation of CallManager from your Cisco reseller. One great way to do this is to bring in a non-affiliated consultant, or a consultant who represents a competing softPBX. I am available to consult with you in this fashion. Contact me.

Don't just have one reseller quote the Cisco solution, either-keep them honest by bidding them against each other. This way, you'll be less likely to leave out those thirdparty add-ons that you might need to re-create the features you have on your current PBX. (Multi-vendor RFP processes are important in any bid, but particularly so with Cisco, since they are speaking about telephony in a somewhat different dialect than the rest of the industry.)

The Verdict

If you must use Cisco but you're concerned about vendor lock-in, interoperability, and standards compliance, then you're probably best served to check back on their progress in another two years or so. In the meantime, do your homework with the other players. One of the reasons Cisco says they are “behind” is because they've taken the additional time needed to support their standards while retrofitting old-fashioned TDM technology, and this isn't a bad thing. That old TDM bus will be around as long as the PSTN exists-in effect, forever.

Don't be persuaded into believing that legacy telephone technology is going to up and disappear next year, leaving you hopelessly behind and foolishly dependent upon Ma Bell, and hung out to dry by a so-called legacy vendor like Nortel. This is just what Cisco salespeople say. There are many more factors in play here than Cisco's marketing strategy-it would behoove you to pay attention to them.

And while it is true that Cisco's commitment to VoIP has been a legitimizing force for the technology, the standards bodies, the competitors, and the open-source movement are changing the telephony world more than Cisco can probably ever hope to. It would be wise to listen to these people, because what they recommend often contradicts what Cisco recommends.

If you're a Cisco evangelist or a Cisco certified network engineer yourself, then you owe yourself an objective look from these other viewpoints. Can you imagine being an automechanic who only knows how to fix a certain brand of car? Say-Audi, a brand with a single-digit share of the overall market? You wouldn't be in business very long without learning how to fix Toyotas, Fords, and Pontiacs, too.

If you can get to an objective decision-making point using the truth as your guide, it is possible to succeed with Cisco VoIP-hundreds of large companies have already done so. That being said, good luck with your telephony project.

About the Author:
Ted Wallingford is an enterprise systems consultant in Cleveland, OH. He is an ardent believer that VoIP is redefining the telecommunications industry, and has been implementing Voice over IP systems for several years. An avid student of telecom technologies, Ted is a member of the Internet Society and an active participant in the voice developer community. He's currently writing a book about migrating to Voice over IP. Ted lives in northeast Ohio with his wife and two children. He can be contacted through his web site macVoIP.com.