Cisco recently announced end-of-sale, end-of-support and end-of-life (EOL) plans for most products in its SMB unified communications (UC) portfolio, including:
A common refrain among users in the SMB community is that Cisco is bailing on them. When you consider that Cisco’s recommended migration path is Cisco Business Edition (BE) 6000, this sentiment is easy to understand.
Cisco BE 6000 is now the lone option for any business with up to 1,000 users, a one-size-fits -all approach that is as impractical and complex as it is unaffordable for most SMBs. Cisco assumes that a business with 50 users has the same needs and budget as an organization 20 times that size.
Migration to BE 6000 involves significant hardware costs, which can include new server hardware, switches, integrated service routers, wireless LAN, a recommended secondary power supply and Cisco Unified IP phones. Additional servers may need to be purchased to provide redundancy and ensure high availability.
Licenses aren’t directly transferable to BE 6000, so additional licensing fees add to migration costs. A three-year Cisco UC Software Subscription is required, and voicemail must be purchased separately. The virtualization platform, additional UC applications, various interfaces, and licensing requirements add complexity that is both unnecessary and cost-prohibitive for most SMBs. You can also expect downtime while hardware, software and applications are installed.
Even if these costs and processes are acceptable to you, ask yourself this question before you decide to follow Cisco’s recommendation and migrate to BE 6000: If Cisco is pulling the plug on all of these SMB products listed above, could it just be a matter of time before they axe BE 6000?
ShoreTel provides a smooth, cost-effective migration path for Cisco SMB customers. ShoreTel Small Business Edition (SBE) 100 is an integrated UC and collaboration platform designed for SMBs with fewer than 100 users, but with a modular design that easily scales as your business grows – up to 20,000 users and 500 sites.
ShoreTel SBE 100 comes complete with simple hardware and software bundles that are ideal for SMBs and cost a fraction of what you would pay for a complex upgrade to Cisco BE 6000. This includes ShoreTel UC Server 20 with a preinstalled operating system and preconfigured and tested ShoreTel Director software, as well as ShoreTel Voice Switch and all necessary licenses.
ShoreTel Director offers a single web-based interface compared to multiple administration interfaces and specialized administrative requirements for Cisco BE 6000. Costs for maintenance and assurance, moves/adds/changes/disconnects, management, and recurring training are all significantly lower with ShoreTel. You can even migrate from SBE 100 to ShoreTel Enterprise Edition by simply applying a software license, unlike other platforms that require an additional hardware investment.
If you’re using a Cisco SMB VoIP product, it’s decision time. Do you ride it out with a soon-to-be obsolete product and endure a costly, complex migration to a platform that’s ill-suited to SMBs. Or do you make a switch to a platform from a vendor with a proven commitment to SMBs?
Let IPC Technologies show you exactly how simple and cost-effective a migration to ShoreTel SBE 100 can be.