My buddy Scott Amoros, I've known since he was at NBX Corporation and then later at 3Com. Scott now works for Convergence Systems a San Diego not-so-new start up in hosted services. Convergence Systems is a Gold Mitel dealer that started building a hosted solution using the Mitel platform five years ago. Scott is now working on the east coast building the channel partners.I have several test ports set up behind my desk and after setting one of them to the office VLAN, I connected the Mitel 5340 IP phone and waited. First impressions always count and you can bet I was clocking the seconds for the phone to become available. After just 38 seconds the phone was in service with dial tone. SIP Means Change may still be a sore point for some but let's get it clear about what it does mean. First off, 38 seconds? Yes--the Mitel hosted IP phone booting off the San Diego IP-PBX consistently beat the time on my internal Panasonic IP phones booting locally. Examine the illustration in SIP Means Change and dare to compare. Next, the phone consumes 3.699 WATTS or 32.403 KWH annually. Using the PoE power saving port scheduler in the ADTRAN can substantially reduce energy consumption.
These are two elements that you must understand: booting from a virtual box in the cloud takes time, and running IP phones requires power and supporting resources. This does not mean you can abandon infrastructure, if anything you better enter in the mindset of building it up, bullet proofing it and forget about focusing just on cost alone. In my previous adventures with hosted solutions including IT health care providers, their boasted savings evaporated quickly, tempers flared and personalities conflicted, and when management realized all this, they failed to communicate and the experts knew that they didn't either. Customer and vendor must have that meeting of the minds before contract signing, not during post implementation when both are trying to figure out what went wrong. It wasn't the technology. This remains why the local Interconnect or VAR will remain, although more in a virtual sense, just with different selling opportunities.
The provided phone is programmed with a DID number from San Diego and any number can port over. While speaking with Jason Bales, President of Convergence Systems, I asked about a "Call Record" button so I could record interviews to my voice mailbox because this allows me to go back and retrieve details. As we spoke and I'm not sure when, the Call Record button just materialized. Real time moves-adds-changes are another improvement in the IPT model--at least for Mitel.
The IP phone is also HD-enabled. The handset is ergonomically right and balanced and the phone is good to look at, meaning I won't sell ugly phones. The only discrepancies are two details that I think Mitel needs to hear about. One, make the HOLD button distinctive with a distinctive color. Two, drop the cheesy icons with pictures on the six fixed buttons above the dial pad because they are useless; use labels with words instead. (Transfer, Hold, Menu, Disconnect, Message, Redial) My favorite feature is Forward to Cell and it's a one-touch button, one touch process that doesn't need fixing. The time displayed on my Mitel phone was my local time in case you're wondering.
Call setup time for most calls was impressive and depending upon time of day, I did catch latency in obtaining ring back, but this is also true with SIP trunks and even with the PSTN in case you haven't noticed over the years--I have. A difference that may or may not matter to very small businesses is that for all outbound calls I dialed 9 then 1. It's not a big deal since we have numerous boxes out there connected to Centrex and other services doing the same thing. What's different is we provide a button labeled as "Dial Out" and it dials 9, meaning it's just a speed dial or quick dial. Music-on-hold was provided and it is customizable for each customer. While the quality of MOH continues to evade IP/SIP circles the reality is don't expect perfection, not yet.
I think that providing a boilerplate solution embedded in a data center isn't a bad idea. After numerous discussions with Jason, Scott and even various engineers at Convergence Systems, I think they are on the right track. Here's some of what I learned about their solution. You will want to review both Allan Sulkin's post: Mitel Announces Truly Virtualized IP Telephony Solution and Dave Michels post: A Real Solution for Virtual Telephony.
The Mitel 3300 is the workhorse behind the scenes of space in a San Diego data center that has all the cool necessities including diverse routing with fiber pairs entering at different locations within the facility. There are two Mitel gateways with onboard session border controllers in the same rack with different IPs for redundancy and load balancing. They are in the process now of bringing online a data center in Phoenix that has a fiber connection back to San Diego for full redundancy. Other elements in their network include the RouteScience box owned by Avaya, and Bandwidth.com is their provider. Jason also told me of their efforts to virtualize using VMware--Sun Hypervisor. Their solution includes Mitel's Multi-Instance Communications Director (MICD) and Mitel Dynamic Extension. Jason and his team have their hands full designing new Voxeo voice mail/automated attendant--IVR with multi-tenant software. For the hosted environment, tenanting must be absolutely flawless and this will be an undertaking to get it right then to keep it right as new customers sign on.
I commend their service and efforts, especially as they move from being an Interconnect to a virtual Interconnect. Here are some obstacles I see in their way:
* Deploying best solutions to SMB, not cheapest solutions, and I'm talking about what goes on the customer site (Infrastructure) besides the phones.
* Cost competitiveness and this may stem back to Mitel licensing costs vs open source solutions. How competitive will the solution stack up against existing solutions including open source? Is Mitel, a traditional manufacturer, ready to change their pricing or will they argue that no change is in order?
* SLAs must provide financial incentives (Penalties paid by provider) to remove barrier of adoption by SMBs that are accustomed to reliable landline service--ADTRAN MSPs are providing this as a competitive advantage. The Telcos refund disrupted services on a pro-rated basis.
* The ability to the blend the solution to work in part with other customer networks and dialing plans.
* Anything with utilization exceeding 70% needs upgrading and I'm speaking to traffic engineering concerns--to keep the solution non-blocking. Customers give up control and vendors control almost everything and that means similar experiences can be learned from Centrex and I don't mean the technology.
I did do a cost analysis and as I told my buddy Scott, "I can't compete against myself," meaning the cost isn't there. Now, for startups that lack cash and viability, I'd consider hitting them with the solution. But startups and one- or two-station deals won't sustain a lasting model of revenue.
Yes, in case some are wondering, my calculator was busy also comparing Kilowatt Hours (KWH) saved for the hosted solution against my IP-PBX. Also, as I discovered in the past, franchisees were financing everything possible in their offices. How that model will stand up today, I don't know but it still deserves a look. Then, the real motivator for me is that I've stated in the past that I'd like nothing more than to be a "virtual Interconnect". Translate that however you may, but there's a new reality that everyone will soon come to terms with: hosted is not a bad thing--call it cloud computing or whatever you think it deserves. I think profits will eventually ring in.
There remains a huge difference in what I've tested in the past (open source) compared to Convergence Systems and Mitel. For one, I know Jason and his team understand the nature of voice in business. Mitel knows how to make those 400+ telephony features work so there is no developmental effort required there. Secondly, I really didn't have to do anything other than set the port in the IAD to the right VLAN. QoS is already set up in our router and we do have tools onboard with ample bandwidth.
The challenges Mitel and Convergence Systems are meeting are in tenant services and I think Convergence Systems understands what's required to solidify that solution. Mitel seems to be leading the pack in virtualization, hosted services and tenanting while Convergence Systems provided the best first class solution for a hosted telephony solution that I've ever touched. What I question is will the solution be affordable to the masses with and without UC? I really hope to hear more from these guys soon.
