Today I has a potential client ask me to for a system that would control his outbound Caller ID. My sales guy was proposing NEC Aspire, which supports custom CLI on PRI calls per station or trunk. So the sales guy says 'Sure, it does that' (like he was really going to say anything else).
When the customer and I get down to details, it gets more complicated. They have about 80 users in 4 different companies on this switch. They have one PRI with 3 DID ranges of 100 numbers each. He wants to be able to assign a company name to the outgoing caller ID as well as a number. Evidentally, he has a high turn over rate, as well as employes getting transferred from one company indentity to another with little warning. Their customer must not know that they companies are affiliated for some reason that I did not catch.
Naturally, as a tech guy, I told him that it don't do that. (Please imagine horrified sales guy at this point). I explain that I can only control the outbound number, and the telco controls the name. This is not good enough for the customer. He insists that he has to have this ability. I told him his best bet was to have the telco build a table of numbers associated with company names in the CO switch. He doesn't like this either. He then pushes to get us to commit to managing this database of names and numbers on his behalf with his telco (SBC in this case). I run screaming from the building.
Thus backed into the corner, I told him that no PBX that I was aware of had the ability to push outbound CID name to the telco, only number. I've done some light research into ISDN signaling and cannot tell one way or the other. Did I lie to this guy? Do any of you know of a PBX or key system or hybrid IP thingy that can do this?
