Cisco Business Edition 6000 (discontinued) vs. Vonage Business Communications

Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000) is well suited on small and medium sites that need entry-level voice and IP telephony capabilities, together
with powerful, easy-to-use collaboration tools. However , if a single user interface or VMware servers are deal breakers for you, I suggest another call system will likely be a better fit.

Vonage Business Cloud is well suited if you have small or limited IT staff and/or you have many remote workers and little or no on-prem hardware. I would recommend Vonage to small to medium-sized businesses. It would not be well suited to a large organization where everyone works in the same building and the IT staff has servers and staff to manage a VoIP system.

Incentivized

• provides phone support for many models of phones and conferencing devices
• provides full telephony support for pretty much any phone requirement including call centre options
• 911 service dialing options and tracking
• bundle pricing on voice, phone and server licensing

Incentivized

• Eliminates physical phone consoles that can be pricey and unnecessary for staff.
• Has a companion app that allows you to use your personal cell phone to check messages or make calls.
• The desktop application is easy to use and has a number of customizable settings so that the app can be minimized but alert you of incoming calls.

Incentivized

• Include tools for inter-cluster migration, currently these are provided by 3rd parties
• Improve the software upgrade process by automating the pre-upgrade and post-upgrade checks

Incentivized

• They do not take billing support calls. Online chat only. That can be dicey.
• Desktop app can have some hiccups and there are frequent updates. Sometimes it switches from my headset to webcam for no reason I can tell. Miss the call be for I figure it out.
• Text messaging does not handle images. Frustrates my clients when they think they can send me a pic of a signed doc or vin# and I don't get it.

Happy with Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000); works great for us and costs to maintain it are well in hand. it also fits our current and future requirements going forward.

Incentivized

BE6K [is] not just a bare metal server ,it is [a] complete solution with its own management tools.

Incentivized

I thought it had very practical and useful usability. It has a clean and simple interface with large fonts that make it easy to read. It isn't particularly difficult, although figuring out some operations may be a bit challenging. For the most part though, it isn't very difficult to use

Incentivized

Overall, the product provides excellent value for money. Our employees may interact at the same time on the Cisco Business Edition 6000 without disrupting the conversation. We have a significant number of employees that perform the same thing with calls, texting, and presence, and none of them have an issue.

Incentivized

We hardly have any issues with it to where we need to call them. There was a point where our connections across the board were terrible and it held us up in production quite a bit but since then things have been pretty simple and streamlined.

Incentivized

Both Mitel and [Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000)] allow the benefit of virtualization. If desired you could have an entirely virtual system. Cisco handles the virtualization a little better, however Mitel MiCollab is easier to integrate presence and calls. Cisco underlying architecture seems to be a little more stable, Mitel seems to be a little more user friendly. There are pros and cons and both are good solutions.

Incentivized

We believe Vonage Business Cloud is best for our organization over the AT&T and the Verizon platforms for several reasons including price, ease of use, connectivity, and other options. Since we have implemented this solution along with newer Polycom phones, we have had very few issues with our phones or our phone platform.

Incentivized

• Been easy to scale as our business has grown and from acquisitions
• Been pretty easy to maintain the software and upgrade it over its lifetime to date
• Software and license renewals are pretty straight forward
• Adding newer model hardware to the system is pretty straight forward

Incentivized

• We were able to remove expensive and out of date phones, and replace them with the user's choice of a new phone or Bluetooth, so we saved money.
• There was training time that needed to be committed for a 50+ person office which reduced productivity for a while.

Incentivized