Phones @ Work

POTD: Whole Foods Market Bedford, New Hampshire

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In recent weeks, the world’s newest Whole Foods Market opened in Bedford, NH. Built on top of the legendary Wayfarer Inn (known more during the Primary Election years), it’s also within hundreds of feet of the now torn down Macy’s.

As proof from Joe the UCX Guy from Chicago, many Whole Foods stores are Cisco shops. Interestingly, the WFM in Nashua, just miles on the Everett Turnpike, is wired for TDM telephony using Toshiba’s Strata system (opened in 2014 to replace a former Market Basket.) Building was totally gutted and rebuilt mostly from the ground up.

The store in Bedford is mixed with 7942s and the 6902s at the cashier’s lane. Paging works, as teenage girls don’t know how to lower their octaves and learn how to page professionally.

The 7900s are still in the market, despite the more cheaper quality sets being deployed more and more. The 7900s are in a depreciation mode. Current generations are all multi lines, Java based and/or colored displays and I was surprised to see a 7942 because I believe its End of Sale.

I snapped two pictures, one showing how much characters you can use to describe your telephone extension. If the characters can’t fit on the top black colored indication bar, it will break the description up in two screens

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Personally, these devices are just “endpoints” – they are PCs acting as telephones. Sure Mitel, and Avaya and others sell the same thing (and acts the same way), but for sales people or the accountants, its just another device attached to the Internet and it shouldn’t be treated special like a office telephone. These phones are not easy to manage outside of expensive Cisco solutions or if you like to code and reverse engineer – be my guest! I feel like the 7900s were always a 2554 with Internet connectivity and a great audio quality of its SCCP signaling.

Other than that, Cisco just keeps on winning on selling “free” gear and report them as “profits” by smooching up to the CIOs and heads of IT departments at the Fortune 500 companies. You think I am kidding???

Phones @ Work: Garbage Time with Katie Nolan

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I spy some Telleyphones on the Telleyvision!

Garbage Time with Katie Nolan is taped sports-talk program that runs on Fox Sports 1. What time does it air? Well, the time varies because the network is heavily dependent on live sports events (who knew, isn’t that why ESPN was created?) I gave up the lost cause by turning my set on FS1 at 9:30pm Eastern Time after running into the soccer games or any other sport I wasn’t interested seeing live. I like the talent because good looking people with intelligence is hard to find on TV. Anyways the program with heavy substance* is an Emmy nominee and a new “season” is supposed to be running on a more decent time, according to promos recently running on Fox.

*because cute brunettes from the Boston area cannot sustain a career because they know what they are talking about!

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The New York produced program is not at the Fox studios. Outside of their cable news networks and flagship TV station, everything is produced or originated in Los Angeles. I believe Katie Nolan has control over her content, and most likely it’s produced third party studio. (There is a clip somewhere showing the very small studio. I bet My home office is bigger than her “studio”!)

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Because of this, you can see this studio operation using Allworx and not any Avayas you see at almost any Fox-owned property (Fox is still religious to being an Avaya Red operation.)

The screengrabs were from about the last 6 months or so living on my iPad. I just finally got the chance to upload them.

POTD: Ralph Lauren 5th Avenue Store

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From little of what I know about Ralph Lauren, it appears they are an Avaya Red shop in some capacity (Joe the UCX Guy featuring an enterprise class) and my local outlet using a Partner (or I should use it in air quotes.)

I have my own opinions of Mister Ralph. a) I can never afford his stuff (the local Macy’s is once in a blue moon) b) I find it more suitable for older people (that Denim and Supply line, I mean really?) if not for older people then more Country Club-types. And of course c) he legally changed his last name from a borderline expletive to allegedly a film crush with the now late Lauren Bacall? Also am I supposed to be pronouncing his name like the female given name or the long e at the end?

Well anyways, here is a Siemens set taken from the sales floor on Saturday. The interesting question would be is did they go to Siemens or were they legacy ROLM users?

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On the other hand here are some sets I didn’t (or wasn’t able to) capture but noticed

The Times Square Aeropostale uses an Avaya Blue Norstar system. For many years the non flagship Aeropostale stores used some analog Centrex, MPLS, or maybe VOIP terminated to analog phone service, up until the last couple months they had fallen into the Cisco bandwagon. Aeropostale is doing very lousy and is in danger of ether going out of business or being sold. Friday’s close was around a couple US dimes. What turned me away from there was all the shirts having these stupid embroidered fabric that is better for little kids. It’s hard to wash, then you have “loose” fabric, etc.

A Ruby Tuesday on the outskirts of Times Square had a Norstar system. (Nice service while I had lunch with the mother.)

The Apple Store on 5th Avenue (lousy service just like if you’re in the burbs. Another topic for another day) had clerks carrying around Cisco 7921 like wireless sets. This isn’t a surprise. Cisco has crept its way through Apple over the years, and now it’s gone to their VOIP or telephones. Most Apple Stores are still an Avaya IP Office shop with most of the wired sets tucked into drawers on the sales floors.

A Best Buy where I got better service, downtown a few blocks had Cisco.

The operations for the Fox News Channel still uses Avaya 8400 and 6400 sets. From what I know at the 1211 6th Ave facility, that the few first floors of the building are for FNC, Floors 7 to 8 (or 9?) is for The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

Once located at the World Financial Center (using a Meridian 1 system), they went to VOIP when the built the new facilities within 1211. An interesting note, on a blog I once found a picture of  Roger Ailes, the head of FNC having both an 8434 and a Cisco set. Without getting into a political discussion, it would not be a surprise he has a direct line to a paper that could favor his views. (WSJ is a joke today and I am a big fan of markets and corporate news.)

I did not set foot inside 30 Rock, but I’ve seen on MSNBC on cable with more and more Cisco 8900 sets. It’s apparent that NBC wants to do away with Avaya at least at their New York operations more and more. They relocated their Southland facilities from Avaya in Burbank to Cisco in Universal City 2 years ago, their other hubs in Texas has been wired to Cisco and I can go on and on seeing yet another customer of Avaya Red disappear.

Many financial institutions are using Cisco (walked by Capital One Bank, TD Bank, JPMorgan, etc.)

Phone of the Day: Avaya Red 7400 Series Voice Terminal – Macy’s 34th Street

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Yours truly was Live from New York yesterday. Put it this way, I saw more Avaya Red sets this time around than Ciscos. A couple Avaya Blues here and there.

I don’t know much of the history of the original Macy’s. Macy’s went under 2 decades ago, and was sequentially boughtout by Federated Department stores that went on a buying spree of regional department stores; then in 2005 made their big buyout of the May Department Store chain of brands. Between the Federated and May buyouts Macy’s was in almost every mid sized city than prior to. Most of the Macy’s around where I live used to be the brands of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s both using/used ROLM CBX switches.

What’s interesting is I’ve been to Jordan Marsh/Macy’s stores and they had resemblance to the flagship 34th Street store, while former Filenes still has resemblance of the pre-Macy’s buyout, but by default all first level stores has that signature all white look. More non telephony related subjects to this store I set foot for the first time on the above link.

Now from what I can tell Macy’s uses an Avaya Red PBX. This one appears to go back in the System 75 days. Now I didn’t see if this thing worked, because in Release 14 (branded as 4.x)  of their enterprise PBX system, they depreciated the 7400s because the four-wire cards carried a lot of legacy code (from what I’ve read on the list serves, just dumping the 7400 DCP drivers gave Avaya some million lines of code removed.)

This particular model I forget, because AT&T made various models in the 10 year period, it may be a 7410 BIS set. Also, just because the 8400s released in the early 1990s, it was not a surprise to still have a part number (known as Comcodes or PECs) – I believe some models of the 7400 were still orderables in the first year of the Avaya spinoff (early 2000-late 2001.) If you were still on the 7400s at that point, Avaya did want you to go to the 6400 series (crap sets.)

More to come throughout the week.

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Phones @ Work: Local Burlington Coat Factory

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This Panasonic KX-T KSU telephone taken at my local Burlington Coat Factory. This is not to be confused with the DBS series that was on the market from the early 1990s to 2002. The KX-T systems replaced the DBS series (for reasons that isn’t well known), despite being the market for about the same time.

You wonder why there’s two handsets cables? I bet the sub/contractor didn’t have a replacement line cord and apparently terminated the cord with an RJ-11 plug, I suppose? Regardless, that other handset cable is serving as the line cable.