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

IP telephony systems have come to represent the future of the telecommunications industry. Though not presently the market-leader (its share of VoIP endpoint shipments slipped in late 2003 early 2004), Cisco Systems has historically dominated the VoIP phone system market. Now that its competitors have more or less caught up to Cisco, many I.T. managers and enterprise evaluators are giving all of the options a serious look. This document is geared toward enterprise implementers who are weighing the pros and cons of Cisco, given its historical context as the leading IP telephony vendor.

It is relatively easy to discover what Cisco IPT's strengths are, but relatively difficult to uncover its weaknesses. Often, you don't know what they are until you're chest-deep in your implementation. By then, you may not know how to deal with the Cisco telephony platform's shortcomings. That's what this document covers.

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
(C) 2003 - 2006 Ted Wallingford