Question

Alcatel and Avaya System comparison and integration

Asked by: MartinPluss

Hi VOIP Experts,

We currently rent a hosted Alcatel OmniPCX entrprise VOIP solution, from a local supplier, and are tied into a 5 year contract with them. The solution is clever, but has very limited management possibilites for us as we share the service with a number of other companies and the hosting company won't give us managment access to it.

I am looking at the Avaya product range as way of moving forwards and I have two questions around this:
1. Has anyone done a feature / cost comparison between the Avaya / Alcatel enterprise products (20+ sites)?
2. Does anyone know of a clever way to integrate the two systems? I think I saw an advert in a magazine once for a black box that acted as a bridge between disparate voip networks...

Thanks,

Martin

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Asked On
2006-12-15 at 03:00:05ID22094395
Tags

alcatel

,

avaya

,

comparison

,

integration

Topic

Voice Over IP

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: kode99Posted on 2006-12-18 at 16:21:58ID: 18162914

I suspect that you may be able to use a Asterisk box between the two systems.  Really depends on what kind of integration you want.  Though not having full control of the Alcatel could pose a problem for configuration.  There is information about interfacing Asterisk with a number of different phone systems out there.  One of the strength's of Asterisk is its flexibility.

No idea of the cost comparison between Avaya/Alcatel though usually seems that most of the proprietary products are fairly similar in price.  

 

by: MartinPlussPosted on 2006-12-20 at 00:56:38ID: 18172083

Thanks Kode,

I was thinking that there is likely to be a box of tricks out there somewhere that will help me integrate the two systems - acting like a VOIP router. I haven't looked at the open source Asterisk solution yet - I'll nip off and have a play.

The belief that a clever box of tricks exists out there somewhere, comes from a hazy recollection of an advert in a computer magazine which showed a commercial 5u black box. I think it said that it could integrate disparate voice systems...

In my current work environment, a fully supported commerical black box solution will always be preferable over an open source solution - until i stealthily re-educate them of course ;)

Thanks for your help though,

Martin

 

by: kode99Posted on 2006-12-20 at 17:37:32ID: 18177861

I have seen lots of black box conference bridges that advertis they work with anything but I suspect that is not what you are looking for.

I would not be surprised that black box you saw did not have some Asterisk based softwrae at it's core.

Heh,  once you get to playing with it you might want to just give up on those proprietary systems.....

It is worth noting that you can get professionally supported Asterisk systems from a number of sources.  So it's not like you would be forced to go with no support.  Obviously this costs more but usually a lot less than the PBX big boys.

 

by: MartinPlussPosted on 2007-02-23 at 05:57:25ID: 18595837

I found the box I was looking for. Its made by a company called Foundry. It allows for featureset interoperability between disparate VOIP networks and hardware - sadly it doesn't support Alcatel, only Avaya, Cisco and Mitel.

Thanks for your efforts,
M

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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