I have been in Telecom sales for 19 years. Some days it feels like 40 ! I’ve had exposure to, and once upon a time actively sold Nortel, and ShoreTel, and today sell Cisco and for the last 4 years the Avaya IP Office.
I suppose every manufacturer has overlapping product lines. Nortel has the BCM 50, 400, 450, and Communication Server. Cisco has UC500, UCME, UCM Business Edition, and UCM. Avaya has the IP Office, and Communication Manager.
There is unfortunately a lot of confusion in the market place with regards to overlapping product positioning.
When do you sell product A vs product B ?
The reality is, as time progresses, and technology advances, yesterday’s SMB product becomes tomorrow’s enterprise solution, and today’s enterprise solution becomes tomorrow’s bigger enterprise solution.
With Avaya’s recent announcement of IP Office release 5 these lines have clearly become blurred.
- The product can support upwards of 384 extensions.
- 40 voice mail ports
- support for up to 150 agent call center
- fairly robust call center capability and reporting
- IVR
- Full call recording through Contact Store
- Unified Messaging
- Extensive mobility capability
- SoftPhones
- 32 sites in a small (or not so small) community network
- Very easy administration
- And the BIGGIE – enterprise scale redundancy. WAN side redundancy
What is that ? Is that not an enterprise solution ? Have these lines become blurred ?
Why do I ask this question ?
I’m fairly often called to task, especially in a competitive Avaya situation, where Digitcom sells a customer an Avaya IP Office, and an alternate competitor sells Communication Manager. The competitor suggests that CM is an “enterprise product”. What does that mean ?
I understand that every customer situation is slightly different, so there is no formal rule book which states that “in this situation sell A, and in this situation sell B”. Every sale needs to be judged and assessed on its own merit and position. I do get that. My question is – what is it about Communication Manager that makes this product an “enterprise solution” ? I’m not looking to find out “how CM is different from IP Office”. That I know. What I want to figure out is – what does an “enterprise solution” mean ?
Any help in clarification is appreciated. Feel free to comment, or send me an email to jw@digitcom.ca
Jeff
P.S. If you would like to submit a guest post to this BLOG, content, comment, or thought on Telecom, or on IP Office, Cisco … your thoughts are appreciated. Send me an email.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
IP Office and Communication Manager are similar in functionality. The major differentiator is the price, system programming complexity, and size. While CM is more expensive, and significantly more difficult to program, the system is expandable to thousands of extensions.
Avaya is renowned as a visionary in the industry and for its ability to execute that vision. The best of the best pour their efforts into refining the communications platforms they offer – and it’s no secret that the bigger slice of the R&D pie goes into Communication Manager.
IP Office is a fantastic product that has found a real sweet spot in the under-384 extension space (or under-500 extensions across the Small Community Network). IP Office emulates the features of Communication Manager nicely and offers their end-users the look and feel of their flagship platform. When price is the key factor in a client’s decision IP Office is the hands-down winner.
The difference between the SMB product and the Enterprise platform become apparent when you compare the features of each. The conferencing capability of IP Office is a key advantage over competitors’ platforms but pales in comparison to CM when you factor in web-conferencing and scalability. Twinning on IP Office is a great mobility feature but is not the robust application that EC500 is. IP Office’s resilient SCN is a much anticipated and needed addition but is not the redundancy CM has offered for years. The list goes on and on…
The real differentiator between an Enterprise solution and the SMB platform is innovation. An Enterprise solution is one that offers cutting edge technology today for clients that demand a distinct advantage over their competition. An SMB platform presents a viable alternative with a reduced feature-set and price to match. If your client is looking for a solution that works today with a hope of better things to come IP Office is a nice fit. If you truly want an edge you need the best, most technologically innovative solution – CM is unquestionably that.
Resilient SCN: One of the limiting factors, with Small Community Networking, is that you also need to migrate to Centralized Voicemail, as Avaya does not support more than one Voicemail server per Small Community Network, which limits the scalability, somewhat.