CISCO IPCC ENTERPRISE VERSUS AVAYA CONTACT CENTER

CISCO IPCC ENTERPRISE VERSUS AVAYA CONTACT CENTER
TOP TECHNICAL WEAKNESSES IN AVAYA’S CONTACT CENTER SOLUTION
1. Architecture
• Complicated to Scale: Avaya contact center solution’s CTI features require a MAPD board. This MAPD board takes up three slots out of a 14 slot G650 Media Gateway. As a company increases the number of IP phones in a campus environment, more CLAN and Medpro boards—each using 1 slot—are added to the G650. Thus the MAPD board takes up precious space on the G650 which could be used house CLAN and Medpro boards.
• Avaya contact center solution still requires the same hybrid TDM architecture for large enterprise solutions, such as the Avaya S8700 Media Servers and G650 Media Gateway. With this architecture, scalability to a large contact center deployment requires more CLAN and Medpro boards as indicated above. Furthermore, each S8700, IPSI, CLAN, and Medpro requires a RJ-45 connection to a data switch such as a Cisco Catalyst® switch. In a large enterprise
deployment, this requirement can use up a lot of data switch ports just to support additional CLAN and Medpro Boards.
• Extremely Limited Fault Tolerance: Avaya fault tolerance requires an optical link between two S8700 Media servers and the distance limitation is six miles. The Cisco IPCC Enterprise solution has no distance limitation and can provide geographically distributed fault tolerance using the split-cluster deployment model.
• Complex call-sharing between multiple contact centers:
The Avaya virtual contact center functionality works through peer-to-peer relationship between multiple S8700s. This model gets substantially more complex to manage as the number of sites increase, and makes enterprise-wide reporting more complex.
2. No Audio Prompt Announcements During IP WAN
Failure in a Centralized Call Processing Scenario
• When the announcement board is located at the headquarters site on the G650 and the IP WAN fails, the callers being routed to the branch S8300/G700 in LSP
will not hear audio prompt announcements.
3. No Self-Service Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• The Avaya ACD system does not include self-service IVR capability. This functionality requires the purchase of separate voice equipment and software.
4. Outbound Dialing
• Avaya packet-driver specification (formerly Mosaix) requires site based separate administration, reporting, configuration, separate telephony cards and is not integrated with the Avaya automatic call distributor.
5. CTI Support
• The Avaya contact center solution does not provide CTI capabilities inherently on the system. This functionality requires separate voice equipment and software.
6. Multichannel
• Avaya multichannel solution does not provide advanced capabilities such as multi-session text chat, e-mail interruptibility, or integrated multi-channel reports.
7. Reporting
• Avaya does not offer Web-based reporting.
• Avaya reporting does not include built-in redundancy.
8. Limited Storage Capacity
• Storage capacity for announcements on the Avaya system is constrained by the capacity of hardware. Typically the voice application language (VAL) board is used and this can store only 60 minutes. In the Cisco IPCC Enterprise solution, the announcements are stored on hard disk. The capacity depends on the size of the hard disk but is generally more than 60 minutes.