July 1999

I’m a telecom analyst working for a marketing company in the Minneapolis area. We have a call center of about 120 reps in which we do about a 50/50 mix of inbound/outbound calls. We are in the market for a CTI and predictive dialer solution. We currently use Lucent’s Definity G3si PBX. We have been through a couple of presentations of the EIC system and are very impressed with the features and the price. Our concern with going to a PC-based PBX is the reliability of the server hardware and NT operating system. I know you have had some hands-on experience with the system, after reading your Jan. 1999 article on TMCnet.com, and I was wondering if you could offer some insight to our concern with the reliability.

Ross Malin

Tom Keating replies:

PC-PBXs are reliable as long as you use good industrial computers and don’t load extraneous applications onto Windows NT. Systems are only as reliable as you want them to be. For example, you can spend money on a PC-PBX that includes fault-tolerant chassis, dual power supplies, etc.

Some EIC system customers who need 100 percent reliability actually have two systems in the event of a failure. That also incurs extra cost. Even a traditional PBX is not 100 percent reliable (99.999 percent) unless you have a backup PBX to which it fails over. NTS Marketing, the example I gave in my article, is a former Top 50 Inbound/Outbound Call Center Solutions award winner, so they are a fairly large call center operation. They use the EIC system and informed me that they haven’t had any problems with reliability.

To sum up, PC-PBXs stay up as long as you don’t put unneeded applications on them. Your best bet is to contact customers who are using the product.

One of my resellers recently sent me a copy of the continued article on PC-based PBXs (May issue) that seems quite confusing. It seems that your lab picked the Artisoft product over the FXS yet you awarded us the Editors’ Choice award. Can you clear this up for me? I’m not sure I understand. I have developed sales tools, ads, and a host of other marketing material expressing how we won the Editors’ Choice award. How can we win your award and still be second best?

Angel L. Gonzalez

Tom Keating replies:

When we reviewed the six PC-PBXs, we analyzed each one individually as well as comparatively. The Artisoft, Comdial, IBM, Telesynergy, and AltiGen products all merited an Editors’Choice award.

All five winners deserved Editors’ Choice awards; however, each of the award winners received varying grades. I would say that Artisoft and Comdial would be virtually tied, followed by IBM, then Altigen, and finally Telesynergy and Picazo, in that order. Numerical rating, instead of letter grading, might have made it clearer.

We prefaced our choice by stating that it was for “our particular corporate needs.” We use Artisoft’s TeleVantage in one of our offices (newest office) and a Comdial DXP in the other. It was not our intention to imply that the Artisoft system is the best system in all cases — just for our particular corporate needs.

I hope this answers your question.