Avaya took top honors as "Best in Test" for its IP telephony solution for small to medium businesses, adding to its first place win for "high end" IP telephony systems in a January 2006 review. In the most recent competition, Miercom cited Avaya IP telephony solutions for:
- Top performance in endpoints, performance and security
- Achievement of the only perfect scores in endpoints and performance categories and a near-perfect score in security; and
- Its security system, which outranked the other vendors' solutions, and included voice-stream encryption on all end points, including soft phones.
The test focused on systems supporting 50 to 500 users across multiple distributed sites.
Miercom ranked each company's solutions based on architecture, endpoints, management and administration, features, security and performance.
The Avaya solution included the recently-announced Avaya Communication
Manager 3.1 software, which helps businesses benefit from a more reliable, open enterprise communications foundation. New and unique capabilities of the software help organisations increase business continuity, improve mobility, drive greater investment protection of multi-vendor technologies with expanded SIP support, and enhanced employee and customer communications. The solution tested also included an Avaya S8300 Media Server, an Avaya Call Controller for small and medium businesses, and Avaya G350, G250 and G700 gateways.
The Avaya solution was measured against three competing vendors with systems that typically support 50 to 500 users.
"Because the Avaya media server, which supports a maximum of 450 users, runs the same core Communication Manager control software that drives Avaya's high-end systems, Avaya offers many of the same capabilities in SMB systems as in their large systems," said Ed Mier, president of Miercom. "That gave the Avaya solution a clear advantage."
In the endpoint category, Miercom said Avaya's broad range of phones that operated with the solution, including Avaya IP and SIP handsets, Avaya soft phone application, several models of wireless phones, and third party SIP handsets, were key to Avaya's top rating, Miercom said. Voice and connection quality were rated "excellent," even when Miercom added impairments, such as packet loss and delay, and easily handled Miercom's load of 7,200 calls per hour, which was designed to represent the "busy hour" load of a typical 500-station system.
"We know that small and medium businesses typically need the same communication capabilities as do large businesses, to enable them to serve customers better and increase productivity," said Micky Tsui, vice president and general manager, converged systems division, Avaya. "By winning top ratings in this intense competition twice in a row, for solutions designed for all sizes of enterprises, it's clear that Avaya is focused on empowering all companies to embed intelligent communications, made possible by IP telephony, into their business processes."