Israeli company AudioCodes offers a the Mediant line of enterprise session border controllers (E-SBC), presently available as appliances in the Mediant 9000, 4000, 2600, 1000, 800, 500 series editions.
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Avaya Aura
Score 8.0 out of 10
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The on-premises Avaya Aura Platform delivers unified communications and customer service solutions, designed to enhance employee and customer experiences. It is presented as real time communications architecture using session-based collaboration technologies, and is used to enable multi-modal unified communications and omnichannel customer experience solutions.
The E-SBC works well in situations where you are working with multiple carriers and/or multiple phone systems and need to route either by IP, sender info or inbound phone numbers.
I find that companies that require faxing to go through the E-SBC seem to be a little less stable than competitor devices.
Avaya Aura is secure and reliable; in our case, for customers that looking for stable solutions on voice, Avaya Aura is that solution fit. In a scenario where our customer is looking for digitalization, I think Avaya Aura is less appropriate.
High capacity for call volume in a chassis with a low rack space requirement makes this gateway a great solution especially when you need more than one!
The ability to have redundant interfaces to the carrier, the network & redundant power supplies, makes these devices perfect for disaster recovery planning.
Ease of configuration via GUI without having specific CLI experience makes it a pleasure to implement the AudioCodes E-SBC with various circuit types. The GUI is particularly helpful when you are about to add a parameter that is incorrect and the device changes the color to let you know.
The low price tag compared to other brands, helps customers easily deploy these gateways to more sites with less cost overhead than others.
The SBC/firewall capabilities of these devices make it very simple to allow or block traffic from specific IP's or proxy groups
AudioCodes support is fantastic. They are helpful to diagnose issues even after it becomes clear that the problem is outside the device and with the carrier or network.
So one of the things it's done well is it's stable. It's networked at all the sites. We have five-digit dialing everywhere, and one of the features we like is the crisis alert feature. So if somebody calls 911 at a particular school, it sets an alarm off on the phones upfront and displays the extension number and the room number of who called 911. So they can respond and they know where to send first responders. So it's pretty cool.
Avaya Aura is extremely complex. Now that AI has come into the fold, Avaya needs to apply AI processes and tools to help identify and resolve issues with an installed platform. In addition, proactively identify potential issues. Ayaya has had some financial difficulties over the last few years. This may be why they outsource their expensive support. Our customer experience would benefit by having access to Avaya knowledgeable Engineers for questions about products and services as needed.
AudioCodes E-SBC's are preferred for use with our VOIP customers due to their ability to scale up and interface with multiple networks in a single chassis for far less than other competitors. We have found that the AudioCodes devices routinely come with more power at the base level than others as well.
So I've seen the Cisco product out there. I've seen the old Nortel products, Mitel, I've been doing this for a long time. I've seen a lot of other products. And Avaya, Nortel were the Western Electric and Northern Electric of the world way back when. So pretty much the grandparents of all the other stuff that's out there. So their foundation is really strong. So I think this product stacks up amazing, especially for places that are mission critical, like hospitals, maybe the military, and stuff like that. They have the app, if you need an app, they do stuff on mobile devices, and that you can have remote workers. So I think they stack up really well against the other companies. The problem is probably advertising and the schools that are teaching this stuff are promoting a particular product and that's where the other products have the advantage. They're in the schools and it's, I call it indoctrination, but they're in the schools and they're teaching the people. The other product, their competitors are teaching in the schools, their product line. And that's how they can do promotion better.
