[asterisk-users] Off-Topic: Avaya

[Salvatore Giudice]

Avaya makes 52% of it's revenue from professional services. In enterprises,
you generally have 3 budgets: Captial, expense, & professional services

Avaya figured out that they could make more money tapping into professional
services portion of the budget with "charge by the hour" union consultants
than by selling equipment. Avaya is also the most pervasive vendor in the
space when it come to calling dev products GA, so they can get their
customers to pay them to beta test.

Avaya's newest ploy is to get customers hooked on their systems and after 6
- 12 months of shear hell supporting the products, they kindly offer to
outsource your voice infrastructure support using a system called SIG. SIG
requires you to place a collector box on your network with an IPSEC VPN
nailed up to Avaya corporate. This gives them full unchecked access to your
network. Exciting huh?

Introducing Avaya into a corporate network is about as smart as introducing
syphalis into a high school. Sure, it was all fun and games at first, but
eventually it catches up to you.


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Jesse Molina
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 1:17 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Off-Topic: Avaya


Salvatore Giudice wrote:
> They are cheap. You only have to pay for the box and the
> maintenance percentage.

That is indeed the Avaya way.  First you buy it, then you rent it.  Stop 
paying their maintenance fees and their dial into your PBX and cripple 
the OS by removing customer maintenance command permissions.



> Hell, Avaya won't even
> give you root on any of their servers. You cant audit the box and you
can't
> poll them unless you pay them money to join their partner program and get
> their SDK. If you already have Avaya, you should just buy Message
Networking
> or a Mitel voicemail server if you want seamless voicemail with Avaya.
> 
> However, you should know that using Avaya is probably a bad idea to begin
> with. Until February 07, the majority Avaya's soft switch products were
> running on Redhat 9, which was unsupported since 2003. Avaya was only
> managing a dozen packages and they've always left it up to the customer to
> know when they need an update, requiring the customer to request a field
> load. It has to be the worst update model in the industry when it comes to
> infrastructure monitoring and patching. By using Avaya, you are blindly
> trusting them to properly maintain a Linux appliance. This is something
they
> are not capable of and you can't even audit them.
> 
> Avaya is what happens to organizations when they have ignorant telecom
> infrastructure engineers deciding what products to buy. Avaya focuses
sales
> on those engineers because they k now their products won't pass
> certification by network, systems, or security engineers. Telecom
engineers
> only look for features and usually get their asses handed to them after
they
> put Avaya VoIP into their infrastructure.
> 

Bravo.  A well-deserved lambasting of this awful vendor.



-- 
# Jesse Molina
# Mail = jesse at opendreams.net
# Page = page-jesse at opendreams.net
# Cell = 1.602.323.7608
# Web  = http://www.opendreams.net/jesse/



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