Avaya Aura vs. Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE)

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.

Incentivized

If IP PBX is Cisco CUCM, CUBE is its best partner to connect PSTN SIP trunks. The multiple trunks can be from different PSTN providers. It also supports SIP forking for network recording.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Call accounting (Integration with 3rd party applications for ease of use and comprehensive CDR's)
• Address hiding (Keeping your internal network secure with PSTN calls)
• Internetworking between multiple protocols
• SIP profiles (message/header customization)
• Billing, cost counting

Incentivized

• The length of time to get an engineer's schedule needs to improve, especially when we're having service-impacting issues.
• At times, some of the engineers have language issues which make it difficult for some of our team to work with, despite the knowledge of the engineer.

Incentivized

• The expense of the device to run CUBE may have you looking outside Cisco for options.
• Requires additional DSPs for transcoding operations.
• There's a bit of a learning curve in getting this set up to work with your specific provider when using this as a SIP gateway.

Incentivized

We are happy with this product since we have used until now around 10 years.

Incentivized

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.

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The flexibility is great for leveraging SIP profiles and dial peers.

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I've been using Cube for years and I like the way Cube handles a call. Minimum administration required once everything is set up correctly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

To be fair to CUBE and AudioCodes, my experience with AudioCodes was over 4 years ago, so their interfaces and CLI may have seen some revisions/updates. CUBE provides a unified CLI experience with the rest of your existing enterprise Cisco environment, whereas AudioCodes blend of a UI and CLI feel a little "90's" in comparison. It certainly can be a tad more friendly to someone just getting a feel for network devices, but the actual feature set felt harder to use as a result. I didn't have any reliability issues or stability issues with either device, though and the AudioCodes solution is less costly, generally speaking, if it will work for your environment.

Incentivized

• Incremental cost saving so far, not seeing a huge difference between individual setup and onboarding an individual group on the central system.
• See some overall collective benefits in terms of support for the groups already onboarded.
• The increase risk of have a centralized system, wherein a single issue could impact each individual.

Incentivized

• Saving money on PRI cost by switching to ITSP connections. Massive savings.
• TAC support is great. Having maintenance with Cisco gear is game changing for small IT shops.
• Streamline security. Great place for a Demarc.

Incentivized