Office 250 end of life replacement?

[Teck900]

Is anybody else as upset as we are with Mitel's replacement for the office 250 ?

the new SMB prices out double and in some cases 3 times as expensive as the office 250.   our small customers are usually from 20-50 stations.

Obviously the SMB based on the 3300 is nice and runs the 6900 phones but most small business are going to buy on price and it can't compete with small stuff like free pbx or 3cx or tadiran etc..

[Tech Electronics]

Teck900,

Well, I would say that being upset is a waste of time, but at the same time I don't like that the MiVO-250 is going away; although it does create opportunities.

My company has moved on to other open source products and we now have our hosted solution as well as being a CLEC.

In this day and age if you don't jump on the open source bandwagon your company will have a hard time competing. At some point Mitel and others like them will have to lower their prices or provide better solutions for the price they expect.

If you are looking for good competitors using Asterisk or FreePBX then look at companies like Xorcom, VitalPBX, Kazoo and my personal favorite BiCom. There is a really nice small business solution from Yeastar as well. I also liked the demo by E-Metrotel as you can reuse some other PBX style phones with their system saving your customer a lot of money early on.

Of course, getting on the MS Teams bandwagon isn't a bad idea either as a lot of companies are moving that way as well. If you are looking for a open-source solution or a product based on an open-source solution than look at the ABC SBC which is based on the open-source product SEMS [SIP Express Media Server]. I am working on a solution for that using Kamailio/OpenSIPs and SEMS when I have time. Unfortunately, with CentOS not getting the love it used to I am also looking into to creating a CGL [Carrier Grade Linux] based on the Windriver and Montavista solutions via Yocto.

Thanks,

TE

[acejavelin]

We have actually decided we are not selling any more new Mitels... which is a pretty bitter pill for me to swallow since I have been a "Mitel tech" since like 1990, although the last 6 or 7 years I have moved to a bit different job role, I have helped out with many Mitel issues, upgrades and installs, but our last new install was almost 2 years ago.

Although the majority of my work is now on our hosted platform, we have moved to Zultys for business and enterprise systems (that I did train on with the regular techs), and ComXchange for hospitality systems... it's kind of bitter sweet, these are nice systems, but I really was used to the Mitel way...

[Tech Electronics]

acejavelin,

I am curious if you were aware of other products that were looked at besides Zultys and why they chose to go that route?

I totally get the ComXchange system for hospitality as that is a nice system, not that Zultys isn't a good system, but we didn't get a demo of that one.

Thanks,

TE

[acejavelin]

We had started down the road of ESI eSIP and actually have a few installed... They have been more trouble then they are worth in my opinion. ESI's Communication Servers were actually very robust and user friendly, but the eSIP is one annoyance after another. Being an ESI dealer for over 20 years we toughed it out a while before we decided this was not a product we wanted to continue with.

We also carry Avaya IP Office, although it's been a few years since we installed one... their OK, but we believe they just don't compete with modern phone systems.

We also looked at SwitchVox, Grandstream UCX, and Allworx... Had some demos with two of them (not Allworx, I don't know why exactly) and they were OK, neither one seemed too want to do more than give us a 30 minute "light show" and find out our sales numbers... But Zultys took the time to listen to us, and their demo with it's desktop and mobile integration and seamless mutli-site networking, literally blew us away from the beginning, and then they took time to do a technical demo and took an afternoon to go through the system features in depth from not just the user side of things but from the perspective of setting them up and how they work on the backside as well. They have just been great to work with all around. All of our technicians are certified on the product as well, at no charge from Zultys. The programming is pretty straight forward once you get the flow of it, although several things require you to "bounce around" in the programming that could get confusing if you haven't done it before, but the flexibility is really good.

Gonna be honest, we haven't done an install yet... We have a couple proposals out there, one for a car dealer with about 60 phones and another for a small community hospital with 3 satellite clinics (all in areas where lines can't be ported away from the local telcos) totaling around 100 phones... So I might change my mind after a couple installs, but so far we feel pretty confident in their product. We don't do a lot of premise based systems anymore, maybe 4-6 per year, but focus on our own hosted platform which is getting close to 10k devices now.

My previous employer (I left my current employer for 2 years then returned) in the Minneapolis metro areas has been carrying it since shortly after I left and has done several dozen installs... I have spoken to some tech friends I still have there several times and although they had some odd issues early on, it's been pretty flawless for years now.

Curious why you say it "isn't a good system"?

[Tech Electronics]

acejavelin,

I think my writing style may have been misconstrued.

I am not saying that it isn't a good system as I have never seen it before and wondered why your company went that route.

I have looked at a lot of systems over the past few months and not one person even talked about this one, so I was curious about it from a technical person's point of view.

From what you said it sounds like a really great system and the support seems too good to be true, and I have added it to my list of systems to look into.

Thanks,

TE

[NTEDave]

acejavelin,

I think my writing style may have been misconstrued.

I am not saying that it isn't a good system as I have never seen it before and wondered why your company went that route.

I have looked at a lot of systems over the past few months and not one person even talked about this one, so I was curious about it from a technical person's point of view.

From what you said it sounds like a really great system and the support seems too good to be true, and I have added it to my list of systems to look into.

Thanks,

TE

Have you looked at Wildix?

[Tech Electronics]

NTEDave,

No, I had not looked at that one either.

Is that the one your company uses as a replacement for Mitel equipment now?

What made you choose that over other options?

Thanks,

TE

[NTEDave]

Hello

We looked at quite a few systems and a lot of them seemed

[Teck900]

I understand what you guys are saying with hosted and we do have a lot of our smaller customers on hosted but that presents more issues especially with Mitel selling out their hosted side to Ring central.   
There is still a lot of types of business that hosted doesn

[Tech Electronics]

Teck900,

We don't use the Mitel Hosted Solution as it was never any good and poorly engineered.

When they started the Ring Central stuff it was just a laugh as they would no longer be your customer anymore so that was a no go as well.

The reason we have spent a lot of time deciding on our hosted equipment was because we also wanted to use it for on-premise customers as well. This means you have to support a lot of different configurations with a homogenous solution that is supported by a vendor; kind of like Mitel.

The other way to look at this is whether or not you want to be the company that develops and supports solutions that you design with equipment from various vendors and hope that supplies can be sourced easily and there is training solutions for new technicians. This can be done, but it requires a lot of work and maintenance as well as in-house training that not a lot of companies can afford and those that can don't necessarily want to.

Thanks,

TE

[Teck900]

(my previous post was cut off Possibly because i clicked on quick reply but here is what I meant to post )

There is still a lot of types of business that hosted doesn’t make sense. for example, Educational situations where you have phones in every classroom that get very little usage and is not worth 15-20 bucks a month per phone
Mitels hosted had some key features that most other hosted providers don’t have.  One big one is the ability to mix and match seats.  In situations where you have only one or two employees that are going to use a feature like recording and with most hosted providers including ring central you have no choice but to make all users an "elite" Seat,  which brings up the monthly cost considerably and can be a deal breaker.  another example is Bridged call appearances, with the mitel we were able to closely emulate key system Line Appearance.  Smaller business where every call is important benefit from the ease of use with this configuration.
 
But the biggest problem I have with most hosted providers is their willingness to sell direct to a customer and cut you right out.
 
So far after working with all the big players (Nextiva, Ring central, Star to Star etc.) we have found that Tadiran Aeonix is the best fit for us so far
They have all the features of a classic Phone system plus all the newest apps and stuff.
Their tech support is US based and very knowledgeable.  The Aeonix is the same software weather you install on site or use their hosted.  we have full access to the programming, so we fix our customers problems right on the spot. 
Tadiran prices better than most of the other hosted providers as well Plus the most important part is they DO NOT sell to the end user. if someone calls them direct they push it down to a partner. 

[QCtech]

Our company has been installing RingCentral and Grandstream for the smaller customers.