AT&T Office@Hand vs. Cisco Hosted Unified Communications Services

Well suited for very basic needs and low phone count. For basic service it will perform as needed. If more advanced needs are required, this will not turn out to be a good fit. Lack of Voicemail to text or email greatly angered the company, slow Video conferencing pushed us back to Zoom and the app was not well put together in my opinion so adoption became almost impossible.

It is well suited for: Clients with call managers that want to continue using Cisco and want to minimize the new CAPEX. Clients that want to outsource the platform management and support. Clients that have a variation on the number of extensions. Although, Cisco HCS, is a solution that has a higher opex than the ones supported in ISP IP Centrex.

Incentivized

• Receiving phone calls
• Making phone calls

• VoIP best practices
• UC and IM
• Centralized management and provisioning
• Reduced OPEX/CAPEX in the implementation
• Security and integration with other UC platforms using SIP (Except Lync)

Incentivized

• Terrible customer service
• Many advanced features that most now want are not developed yet
• No Voicemail to text or even as an attachment to emails so getting voicemail remotely is horrible/difficult

• Integration with contact center plaforms
• Integration with other UC platforms
• Lower the tennant size and clusters capacity
• Cisco's pressure to buy more and more licences, even not having a stale client pipeline (From the ISP point of view)

Incentivized

Horrible. Collaberate was a little slow at times in responding, but they never just left us hanging with unresolved issues. I am now going with a local guy so I do not have to deal with this stuff. I get very irritated when I am transferred to someone over seas that English is not their first language, and they are working off of a script. Although some of them were more helpful than my assigned migration person.

Cisco HCS platform is to be seen as a centralized UC platforms, that can be scalable as an IP Centrex solution and as rich in functionalities as a Cisco CUCM. If you're looking for a solution and your main focus is IM & P functionalities rather than voice, Lync is a good solution. If your focus is voice and telephony, Cisco is a better solution

Incentivized

• I wish I had never switched from my local VOIP phone provider
• Office at Hand is a mistake I wish I'd never made

• Reduces the need to have a higher CAPEX in order to buy all the licenses at the start of the project.
• The licensing is perpetual, the only associated cost with the licenses are SWSS.
• Desktop sharing isn't a functionality.
• Cisco SMB series can be used only with the higher cost licensing (Foundation/Standard).

Incentivized