Overall Rating: 2/5
Response Time: 3.5/5
Overall Knowledge: 1.5/5
Personalities: 4.5/5
Levels to SME*: ?
Familiarity with “Greenfield“: No
Primary Contact: Erwin Gunnells
*Number of contacts (people) I talked to before reaching a subject matter expert.
Shortly before we ruled out Nortel as a potential partner for implementing and deploying Office Communications Server, we contacted Dell to talk about providing the same services. Where our conversation with Nortel left me uncomfortable, the conversation with Dell ended within two days. As with Nortel, the people that we spoke with were very pleasant, but I just didn’t feel that they were ready to execute an enterprise deployment of a complicated product.
I might have been able to predict the result of this conversation simply by looking at Dell’s UC site. There really isn’t very much there at all. They don’t talk about OCS (at least that I could find), their material seems to be marketing alone, and there aren’t any real case studies. Aside from the fact that Dell uses OCS internally, there was nothing to make us turn our heads.
The one really positive experience we had with Dell was talking about software concerns. Casey Spear and a number of Microsoft representatives (Janet Gresco, Steve Todd) have been fantastic in addressing our many questions and even suggesting appropriate alternatives that we didn’t know existed. If you’re in the Pac/West region, I highly recommend that you contact Casey if you have any questions about Microsoft licensing.
