Cisco Business Edition 6000 (discontinued) vs. Fuze

Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000) is well suited on small and medium sites that need entry-level voice and IP telephony capabilities, together
with powerful, easy-to-use collaboration tools. However , if a single user interface or VMware servers are deal breakers for you, I suggest another call system will likely be a better fit.

Fuze has way more capability than we need for our small office so it might be best suited for large installations, call centers, and complex environments. Our office is small and our needs [are] minimal, so when we need support we are challenged to understand the support person due to our lack of technical sophistication. We sometimes feel like we should switch to a solution more geared for consumers or SOHO. Nevertheless, Fuze provides reliable service at [a] reasonable cost that meets our needs, and because support is rarely needed we are happy with them most of the time, i.e. when support isn't needed.

Incentivized

• Smarter and more economical telephone system.
• Deployed on a Cisco UCS server.
• Easy and centralized management.
• Unified communications with chat, voice and video for all users.
• Telephone support in Portuguese with Cisco.

Incentivized

• Availability to use your work number anytime anywhere. Our recruiters make themselves available as much as they can. Being able to answer calls from their worklines while not in the office and make calls from their work numbers is a big deal.
• Setting up new phones and numbers is very easy with their hub. I don't always have to go directly to their support team to setup new users. As long as I have the mac address of the phone and we have free numbers I can set a new user up in minutes.
• Their support team is great as well. If I do need to get help with an issue their support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable about their systems. Their team is also able to fix most support cases within the same day.

Incentivized

• Include tools for inter-cluster migration, currently these are provided by 3rd parties
• Improve the software upgrade process by automating the pre-upgrade and post-upgrade checks

Incentivized

• Desktop application stability and compatibility with certain hardware.
• Better installation - Per-user and per-computer installs sometimes compete with one another and/or upgrades fail to install.
• [The] desktop app is not best for touchscreen-enabled devices due to lack of ability to scroll through messages using a finger or stylus.

Incentivized

Happy with Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000); works great for us and costs to maintain it are well in hand. it also fits our current and future requirements going forward.

Incentivized

Cost and support and the primary driving factors. The management team has been extremely responsive and assisting even with the obstacles and hurdles we experienced during implementation. We are still learning how best to manage the solution and comfort and pleasure with the solution will increase as our knowledge and skillsets improve.

Incentivized

BE6K [is] not just a bare metal server ,it is [a] complete solution with its own management tools.

Incentivized

For most user, Fuze is very user friendly and easy to get use to. When it comes to the admin portal, it can be a little more challenging. There are also a lot of feature you unable to do as an admin that would normally be accessible. This cause the admin to have to rely on Fuze support, which could delay the resolution of a problem

Incentivized

We've had a few outages over the past year. More than other vendors I've used. They usually have outages fixed within an hour. The downside is they do not provide root cause of outages. If they do at takes them at least a month to get it to you

Incentivized

Since Fuze runs across multiple devices and platforms they really strived to make a lightweight interface that is optimized for phone calls, chat, and collaboration. The web client loads fast, the chat is always up-to-date, phone calls arrive on-time. The desktop client is the most feature rich and basically it just adds desktop sharing functionality as well as VoIP for calling, and the mobile client doesn't consume a lot of battery, and it stays running to get phone calls, chats, and can do meetings over Wifi, Cellular Data, or Cellular voice.

Incentivized

Overall, the product provides excellent value for money. Our employees may interact at the same time on the Cisco Business Edition 6000 without disrupting the conversation. We have a significant number of employees that perform the same thing with calls, texting, and presence, and none of them have an issue.

Incentivized

Our experience with Fuze support has been overall very positive. Their technicians seem to be well trained and able to handle a variety of requests and issues without unnecessary delays or extensive troubleshooting. Fuze allows enough customer access to avoid the need to call support for every little issue but is ready to assist when issues are beyond our capabilities to resolve.

Incentivized

At many of our sites with more than 50 users, Fuze sent someone onsite to train. This worked surprisingly well, as the trainer allowed the users to set the pace and answered TONS of questions. Fuze has a very streamlined training process, their staff is very professional, very knowledgeable and very engaging.

Incentivized

Fuze has vast amounts of training videos and guides on how to use its products and services. There are literally endless-hours of training and I often point end-users to a particular video which addresses the specific needs of the user, for example: how to check voicemail. Or, how to share your desktop, etc.

Incentivized

Personally, I didn't have any trouble getting started with Fuze. It was installed on my computer on my first day and I was good to go! Little to no hiccups. I was not with the company when they first adapted Fuze so I can not speak to the implementation as a whole.

Incentivized

Both Mitel and [Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000)] allow the benefit of virtualization. If desired you could have an entirely virtual system. Cisco handles the virtualization a little better, however Mitel MiCollab is easier to integrate presence and calls. Cisco underlying architecture seems to be a little more stable, Mitel seems to be a little more user friendly. There are pros and cons and both are good solutions.

Incentivized

We have had several vendors try to get our phone business, and I have always given my opinion to management why we need to stay with Fuze. Customer service is wonderful and the support staff puts up with me and they are very helpful. We use another company to do our dialing campaigns. Not sure why, but I think the reason was Fuze didn't offer that service. Fuze from the beginning appealed to our business due to the fact that it seemed so easy to use and manage.

Incentivized

Fuze does have scalability limits but most of that is how many end-points they can put on a virtual PBX, or VCX as they call them, I THINK its limit is somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000, but we've not had issues with that because we have put users into various VCXs some by location, some by department or function. Either way, we have 7,000 currently deployed, and are going to end up with over 15,000 when we are done, Fuze is VERY scalable.

Incentivized

• Been easy to scale as our business has grown and from acquisitions
• Been pretty easy to maintain the software and upgrade it over its lifetime to date
• Software and license renewals are pretty straight forward
• Adding newer model hardware to the system is pretty straight forward

Incentivized

• We receive constant negative feedback from mangers about the system not functioning correctly. (This is mainly due to lack of support from Fuze)
• This has had a positive impact in that the system is cheaper and we are missing less calls due to the functionality of the system.

Incentivized