atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Vertical Telephones & Systems Vertical vs Cisco

I definitely share your sentiment Deltron - but there are telephone men who know their stuff and do the Cisco deal, incredibly rare as they might be. Looking back I wish I had said "garden variety" Cisco installer.

The Wave is still running on 2003 Server, will this be a problem with your network? Vertical is not in a hurry to migrate to a newer OS. They also require you stay current with SW in order to be supported. To upgrade an older 3.0 Wave, a total forklift of the system is required to upgrade, new cabinet(they made it bigger), new ISC(CPU). Makes me wonder when or if they migrate to 2008/2012 Server, what other hardware upgrades will be required. Keep an open mind and shop some other systems,Shoretel,Digium,Mitel,NEC. Vertical licensing will bite you too even though they're 'giving' you more features.

We sell an asteriks based open source product, I won't mention the name. It is price competitive, feature rich, in fact most features are in the system at purchase except for a full ACD package which is an add. The best thing about this product: NO LICENSING FEES. I can sell around Cisco and all of the others all day every day simply because the end user buys the system one time. Some might say its a loss of a revenue stream. I answer that by saying that my market is not on the enterprise level, so call it 50 phones and under. These customers do not have endless deep pockets to repurchase features that they already bought and continue to do that year in, year out. We have learned that we can charge more for IP maintenance contracts and service issues because we have become data integrators, not phone guys. If I am in a competitive bid situation, all I have to do is do a 5 year cost of ownership against a Cisco, Shoretel, ( I have yet to run into a Wave in my market) and we are home. Just my take on this. Not bashing the Wave in any sense.