Sadly, where I live, Avaya or Nortel isn’t “alive and well” unlike another site I follow. Nortel has disappeared in my state in public and private entities in lieu of Cisco years ago and Avaya Red has slowly disappeared too.
On a Christmas Eve tradition before I was born, my family would order pizza out at the local Papa Ginos, that is local chain with more than one hundred stores around the Greater Boston region, basically in four of the six New England states. It’s reputation is fresh quality pizza of with quality ingredients. Over the years Papa’s has had exclusive marketing deals with the local Boston teams such as the Red Sox and currently the Patriots.
The chain has used AT&T products going back to the days of Western Electric. This location I had frequented growing up had used one of those 10 line 1A2 wall mount Key telephones till a cutover around 2001 to a Partner ACS system. The only ComKey I’ve ever seen in production was another store nearby, and that had cutover to a Partner circa 2001 or 02.
I’ve been to mostly the New Hampshire stores, and D’Angelo the sub shop, is a sister brand to Papa Ginos. I don’t recall them using any phone systems, the one nearby me, that I took a few years back with an Avaya van uses POTS phones.
But today, just the next block away from that same D’Angelo, I noticed this phone. Nope, its not a 9600 Avaya IP or 9500 DCP set. No, worse a Polycom VVX 310 set. (I haven’t been here for a while, some days I normally walk here because it’s not that far away from my home.)
My heart fell on the floor. I couldn’t believe as much as I hated the Partner system to begin with, to see an ABA – Anything But Avaya to be installed.
I bet this Polycom is using some ITSP, most likely a cable provider like Comcast and to be quite honest its very risky to use VOIP phones and using them directly to the Internet. Comcast is making it’s way around local businesses to have SIP/IPT services. In fact, I could tell by my Polycoms I got recently tied to Comcast by telling by it’s provisioning URL prior to factory resetting the unit.
There is many risks of using cloud-based phone service that mimics KSU like services. A follower on my Instagram said basically if it looses connection to a provisioning server that could bring trouble. I do not think of the Internet being used behind the counter at Papa Ginos, so one would hope there is enough capacity in the pipes.
Now the rest is my rant of the day.
It makes me sad to see this, and there is rumors again as of Christmas week that Avaya is closer to bankruptcy and some net columnists are comparing this to being a clickbait story. I am afraid of the unexpected to occur. Alternatives are being pushed by VOIP providers in case the worst does happen. But these VOIP systems to be blunt are toys. It’s only feature set is to talk to other apps like Salesforce, social media and other apps that are also toys.
So what should a mature call center for an example want a toy when they are using tools such as ERP applications like SAP, or PeopleSoft/Oracle, etc.? A lot of these VOIP providers who insist they will be able to take Avaya’s call center customers away with a slick and sick sales tactic will be confused because the apps the “toy” phone system will work with will not work well with the real apps.
Many of these VOIP/SIP providers only give you forwarding calls to a smartphone, all flavors of call forwarding but not priority calling, not camp-on; paging is a joke on many of these platforms, voice mail transfer can save minutes for callers who may be calling afar; rather than transfer to extension then wait till the voicemail from internal than hang up to hear the vmail greeting. And don’t give me lip that 99% of the users will never use it; its that 1% of the anti social IT nerds who don’t train their users at all for anything that makes many tech systems difficult to use!
If Avaya goes away, there’s always Cisco and Microsoft? Wrong! Cisco still can’t allow people to do advanced PBX features found in competing legacy systems for years! Microsoft’s solution, cut the phone and use your voice literally! At least voice recognition was their way to kill the mice and keyboard, and TAPI was their weapon of choice to kill desk phones twenty years ago! If you make it so worthless, then you win your own agenda of killing devices that has worked in small enterprise for decades. Why break things that work because it’s broken in your unethical IT-mindset? I thought the PC was dead, so therefore IT was dead. I guess I must misunderstood something…
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from The Museum of Telephony.