Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager) vs. Lumen Next-Gen Voice

Cisco Unified Communications Manager is suited for medium to large customers who are in search for a solid call control platform with added security in mind. Cisco Unified Communications Manager also supports receptions, small groups and also a mini contact center type of set up with its Hunt Group, Pick up Group and call queuing facilities and also with set up of music on hold function while calls queuing.

Incentivized

CenturyLink SIP is an acceptable solution if you have an on-prem PBX (ShoreTel, Mitel, etc) that accepts SIP. I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP.

Incentivized

• This solution is extremely stable and has been running in our environment for several years without (unscheduled) downtime.
• The ability to have voicemails automatically sent as an email message is extremely helpful in helping us to keep in touch while away from the desk.
• The Call Manager provides us very granular settings to route our calls as we want.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• Administration web page is little bit hard to understand at the beginning specially if you are not familiar with naming convention and GU Interfaces.
• Call Detail Record interface is fine but would be desirable to include more options that fit organization needs in terms of reporting purposes.
• Self Care Portal interface could be more useful to the end user if it includes options to manage some features without administrators involving.

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

We have been using this product for 20+ years and will continue too. This is a great product and new features are always coming out.

Incentivized

The usability part of Cisco Unified Communications Manager is very much simple from a usability point of view. Day-to-day Move Add Change Delete (MACD) can be performed by the administrators very easily with simple training. From the initial deployment point of view, some of the thing can be improved to simplify the process.

CUCM is supported by most third-party vendors for related products, so it makes finding solutions to specific needs easy. Also Cisco TAC is very knowledgeable, and we have never run into a problem they have not been able to resolve. Usually they are resolved without the need to escalate tickers either.

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

This was the first phone system we implemented that could span multiple locations. We were very satisfied once fully implemented

Incentivized

We have been a Cisco based shop and have looked at other cloud voice options such as MS Teams pbx, and others, but ultimately, the features, endpoints, and reliability of Cisco has been the common factor in staying with them as our voice provider. Their integrations, room systems, and hybrid design allows for us to be flexible and keep a high up time vs reliance on 100% cloud.

Incentivized

CenturyLink [Enterprise Voice SIP] was the incumbent, so switching providers, particularly for our HQ was an overwhelming task for our small team. We did migrate from the legacy CenturyLink voice product EIPT to the new Voice Complete solution as well as upgrade our US and UK circuits along with a hardware upgrade of the managed PE routers in each location. We also decided to implement RingCentral in one of our very small international branches but the lack of features is problematic. We still have T1 service in our other international branches but are looking to go full cloud SaaS PBX there, likely through Microsoft Teams, which we already use for messaging. There are some complexities, as we can't port our numbers directly yet and need to set up an additional CUBE router for SIP. Eventually we hope to get to fully SaaS via Teams.

Incentivized

• Communication and collaboration - Our offices are able to communicate both internally and externally due to this system.
• Down time - Struggles with CUCM has caused a lot of down time due to the instability of the system.
• High Costs - the cost of both the license and the maintenance was much higher than other systems.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized