OCS Partners: Dell

del.icio.us Tags: dell,office communications server,microsoft

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.

OCS Partners: Nortel

del.icio.us Tags: nortel,office communications server,microsoft

Overall Rating: 3/5
Response Time: 2.5/5
Overall Knowledge: 3/5
Personalities: 4/5
Levels to SME*: 2
Familiarity with “Greenfield“: No
Primary Contact: Matthew Christopher (Western Region ICA Overlay Team)

*Number of contacts (people) I talked to before reaching a subject matter expert.

Nortel was the first partner I contacted, based upon their strategic alliance with Microsoft.  My initial account contact was handled by Efrem Anderson, who did a great job of finding someone for me to talk to.  I was pleased to find that Efrem at least knew the term Office Communications Server, but beyond that there didn’t appear to be a solid understanding of what I needed.  This is completely acceptable at the account manager level; knowing whom to talk to is sufficient.

Efrem put me in contact with Matthew Christopher, who truly seemed to be aware of a lot of the high-level aspects of OCS.  I don’t think I’d have felt comfortable passing all of my needs to him, but as a primary point of contact, Matthew was awesome.  I should also mention that Matthew was very receptive to my questions and seemed to have good knowledge of connectivity to the PSTN, which is one of the areas where I am weakest.  Matthew initially suggested that we pick up a small Nortel CS1000 PBX to help run the system, but when I pressed him for why we needed it and explained our situation, he agreed and even offered that we might want to connect directly to the PSTN through media gateways.  He never offered the word “Greenfield” as the name that typically references this type of deployment, so I got the feeling that he wasn’t completely familiar with how it worked.

In spite of that, if all Nortel employees had been as responsive and knowledgeable as Matthew, we might have selected them as a partner.  Unfortunately, the team Matthew was working with dropped the ball and failed to get me a scope of work.  That, in combination with the fact that I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the other SMEs on the team, helped us to decide that Nortel wasn’t the partner for us to work with.

I should note that if your business needs a PBX (to hang non-OCS phones, faxes, etc off of), Nortel might make an excellent partner.  My primary problems with them were responsiveness and lack of understanding of “Greenfield” deployments.