Cisco Hosted Unified Communications Services vs. Vonage Business Communications

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

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

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

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

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

• 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

• 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