Avaya IP Office vs. GoTo Connect vs. HotTelecom

So I haven't had one where it's not appropriate at all unless somebody was going pure cloud. Obviously, this is not a cloud product, but from an on-premise solution like the IP office is, we've sold it to companies that have five users and we've sold it to customers that have thousands of users. So it's very expandable, adjustable to be it's hybrid, so it's IP and digital mix capabilities. So that's a strong suit.

Incentivized

Go To is a great phone system that has made the transition from our old landline phone system to a VoIP product easy. Our users can customize their speed dial buttons; the dial plans are robust, so we can fully customize anything we need to; and, besides provisioning, setting up a new device is quick and easy.

Incentivized

When our clients or partners call our corporate number they can now reach any needed employee or department by themselves. It is simple - they just need to use voice assistant and press the needed number.

• It is a phone system. It dials calls, makes sure there's a secure login, and keeps securities actually quite good on it. It provides and allows for VPN access into the VPN phones, into it via SIP or via IP sac, and has a good voicemail system.

Incentivized

• Call reports: You can see and review calls received from the first receptor until the last who attend this call, also you can review all calls make and received by your teams
• Voicemail options: Availability to create some voicemail with multiple receptors
• Devices option: with several options to change on your devices
• Audio library: Multiple option to create your own audio library with or without ambien music

Incentivized

• The call recording feature.
• The high quality of calls.

• Remote access and alarming. So most of the VIA products, actually, I'm going to say all, it's a pretty big brush, but all of them, except for the Avaya IP Office family, don't support Sal Gateway. They don't support remote access or Sal alarming. Everything else does. And it's crazy that this product doesn't, so that's one thing it could do better.
• Analog and digital circuit line management needs to be better. You still have to reboot controllers to add and remove phones from it, which is kind of embarrassing. Sometimes, you have to tell someone about it when you compare it to all of its competition. Those are the two things I would take away is needs immediate improvement.

Incentivized

• Making a dedicated button for "mute all" (other than yourself) for when someone "walks off before they mute"/has to quickly leave their computer....and FORGOT to Mute. Particularly when dogs are barking when someone working from home has a visitor at the door
• I'd like to see some of the functionality from GoTo Webinar enabled for GoTo Connect: see who's "actively watching" vs has their computer screen on another application

Incentivized

• Nothing at all. We are satisfied with the product and customer support

Oddly enough I have been impressed with the IP Office platform so much that I have integrated one into my home. My wife was not happy with it initially but once she started using it she was very happy with the results. It helped that I programmed it to work just like a home phone but with features and options that I can utilize remotely. I would be more than happy to put an AVAYA IP Office against any other phone system on the market, and let you be the judge.

Incentivized

They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move

Incentivized

Avaya IP Office is a great system that is somewhat affordable for most SMB's. However, In our experience, Avaya IP Office has a tendency to shelve some of the license as you upgrade the software release on the PBX switch without giving back any comparable license to compensate. The Voicemail Pro license is quite expensive and most of the functionality that most business needs are not covered in the standard voicemail offering.

Incentivized

Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.

Incentivized

I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.

Incentivized

There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.

Incentivized

Support used to be great when it was Jive support out of Utah. Now that they've offshored support it can be difficult to get a response. Our most common issues are least cost routing, and we run into support pushing back in stead of just figuring out which upstream carrier is having an issue like they used to. We often have to get our account manager involved, who is pretty strong.

HotTelecom's support team has answered all our questions during the setting up process and now they can help to solve any issue with the product if needed within a short period of time.

The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.

Incentivized

The implementation was incredibly easy and straightforward. I came into the project never having migrated and changed phone systems before, and the team at Go-To made it super easy to port all of our numbers and phone lines over to the new system. It was not intimidating, and all of my questions were answered promptly.

Incentivized

Obviously, the Aura stuff, but that's a whole other class, but there's a lot of transition between those customers. So I've seen a ton of those. I've done RingCentral, I've done it via cloud office. I've been a user of a Nortel system, but I've never had to administer it. I've built Asterisk machines too. Those have been fine. The Avaya IP Office still outperforms them all for the price, though. Probably the only thing that's still thrown at a small business.

Incentivized

Honestly, tools like Zoom or Google Meet are fine if you just need basic video, but they completely ignore the actual phone side of things. I chose GoTo Connect because it handles everything at once. We finally ditched our clunky old phone provider and stopped paying for separate chat apps. Now my team manages client calls, texts, and meetings from one single screen. It just makes life so much easier.

Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.

• When selling to a prospective customer, I always do a 10 yr ROI to show the benefits of Avaya IP Office or ACO and which scenario would fit best.
• CAPEX vs OPEX
• Number of phones needed as well as other features need to be considered to determine if Avaya IP Office fits best.

Incentivized

• Cost Savings have been realized from reducing hardware .
• We are all able to collaborate remotely and it has been seamless and easy to setup.
• I'm able to pull reports, i wish there was improvement on the data analysis side. It has gotten better since LogMeIn, but something is a miss and can be improved.

Incentivized

• Telecom cost reduction.