A product that has five 9's reliability and availability. Additionally Microsoft partners who know the product inside out and have indepth experience in VoIP in general. Delivery capability is at best patchy at worst an appalling mess. Once that is solved people will not rip and replace existing systems until they come to end of life unless there is a proven ROI.
This is a great comment. I am working with a bay area service provider on the tail-end of an OCS implementation. We are not near 5 9's, and the process has been every bit as patchy as the gentleman above described. We still get lots of digitization, some dropped calls, have normalization problems etc. I am not an expert, but I believe the experts we trusted may have virtualized servers they were not supposed to - and though they claimed they had done 15 + implementations - ours was about as bad as it could get. We almost killed it and went back to cisco. We are over the hump now, but IT's reputation was severely damaged, and there is still a general negative perception on the phones and phone system. I would love to get an expert in to our hosting provider for a review and write-up on what was and is still wrong with our configuration.....
Thanks for running with the first comment and expanding on your experience. Feel free to shoot me an email. Understand you dont want to use the name of the service provider on the blog but I am sure those of us within MS would like to hear more of your situation.
Keep the comments coming, appreciate the great feedback so far.
We have mixed Cisco/Avaya systems with full call center. Telcom team not interested in adding a third system even if it is for a transition period.
ReplyDeleteGetting the Telco team to see MSFT as a legit player in the space. You own the server and desktop space but not the telco room.
ReplyDeleteGood feed back so far.....In your opions whats it going to take to change the telco teams mind share?
ReplyDeleteA product that has five 9's reliability and availability. Additionally Microsoft partners who know the product inside out and have indepth experience in VoIP in general. Delivery capability is at best patchy at worst an appalling mess. Once that is solved people will not rip and replace existing systems until they come to end of life unless there is a proven ROI.
ReplyDeleteAgain more good feedback. What gives you the impression OCS doesnt support 5 9's? Can you expand on this?
ReplyDeleteThis is a great comment. I am working with a bay area service provider on the tail-end of an OCS implementation. We are not near 5 9's, and the process has been every bit as patchy as the gentleman above described. We still get lots of digitization, some dropped calls, have normalization problems etc. I am not an expert, but I believe the experts we trusted may have virtualized servers they were not supposed to - and though they claimed they had done 15 + implementations - ours was about as bad as it could get. We almost killed it and went back to cisco. We are over the hump now, but IT's reputation was severely damaged, and there is still a general negative perception on the phones and phone system. I would love to get an expert in to our hosting provider for a review and write-up on what was and is still wrong with our configuration.....
ReplyDeleteHi Andreas,
ReplyDeleteThanks for running with the first comment and expanding on your experience. Feel free to shoot me an email. Understand you dont want to use the name of the service provider on the blog but I am sure those of us within MS would like to hear more of your situation.
Keep the comments coming, appreciate the great feedback so far.
Just wanted to make a clarification. Andreas is talking about a hosted service from a third party supplier and not an on-premise deployment of OCS.
ReplyDelete