Best switch for Genesys?

[James]

I realize that my question might sound a bit absurd, but please try to hang on while I try to make some sense. We are planning on creating a call center farm, which would allow multiple SOHOs to rip full benefits of CTI without the expenses of purchasing and maintaining a call center. Genesys multi enant approach seems to be the best fitted product for our purposes and we pretty much settled on it. But, we still are in doubt about what switch we should be using. So far we tested both Lucent G3 and Meridian 81C and both of them have their pros and cons. We are projecting around 300 to 800 agents per switch with a call volume of 600 cals per hour. Based on your experience so far, what switch, if any, would provide us with the least errorprone Genesys environment ? Based on our studies so far, most of the maintenance expenses incurred are of a software and not hardware in nature, therefore, we would like to minimize our Genesys elated maintenance to a barest minimum. And thus a question what switch does Genesys work the most with? James Am I mad? Yes, slightly...

[James]

I have experience with the G3 & 81C and for me the Lucent wins. Have you considered doing everything with VoIP?

[Victor]

Well, Meridian seems to be working fine with Genesys. Some things are simply not available (like RAN) and some of the messages are not passed (like when calls comes from a nonAST to an ACD queue and EventQueued is not being sent) but at least it ticks Victor

[Rob Townsend]

I could not resist answering. In terms of CTI the Lucent G3 is the hands down winner here. As an integrator I work on both. There is no comparison. Get the G3 and save yourself a ton of headaches and CTI bugs. Do not be fooled by seemingly lower Meridian 1 costs. By the time you are done the G3 is about the same price, however the G3's stronger CTI will yield a lower overall cost of deployment. Just take a look around this site to get an idea of the Meridian 1 weaknesses. Good luck.

[mika lefebvre]

well, Genesys is an Alcatel company.

Alcatel 4400 is a good pbx.

i can easily imagine there will be more and more links with Genesys suite.

(by the way, we have an Alcatel PBX)

[Victor]

This is the first one. I thought that Alcatel support was somewhere between Hicom and Symposium!

What made you choose Genesys for Alcatel?

You are right about one thing it is an Alcatel company now; however, it took them two years to get out a decent version of the products for Meridian, so I would give it yet another year before I would consider even evaluating an Alcatel elated product.

[Chris Thoman]

I also feel obliged to place another vote for the G3. Admittedly, TServer's support for the Meridian's quirkiness has improved dramatically in 5.1 and above, but the Lucent will give you the fewest headaches. You might also want to consider how important handling multiple direct DN calls is to your call center if you are building a desktop softphone application. AFAIK, the TServer/Meridian link combo will only transmit events for a single direct DN call at a time (although you can still handle a direct DN call and a position id call at the same time). On the G3, you can have up to 6 call appearances simultaneously on a single station.

[Jessica]

I am not very familiar with G3. What exactly do you mean when you say that there are six call apperances on the same DN?

J.

[Blaine Overstreet]

Although you can have multiple appearances of the same DN on a Nortel set, it doesnt work very well. Consequently, you give someone a DN and then hunt to one or more different DNs on the same phone. On the Definity, if you need 4 lines for a user, you have four of the SAME extension. It doesnt eat up your dial plan like the Meridian and it simplifies call coverage and programming.

[Ed]

Basically Genesys develops against the G3 call model. It is the link you are concerned with. ASAI/MAPD is a mini unix implementation on a card on the switch. down time is minimal and the API has more to offer. Meridian with Meridian Link ( soon to go away but was also unix based and on a card on the switch ) would have been 2nd runner up. Symposium adds layers to messaging from the data side of the switch and is on relativley unstable platform ( Windows NT ).

[Victor]

I think there are few things that you should consider. Maintenance is expensive, but initial price is another thing that you should consider. Meridians are MUCH cheaper than Lucent...

I found Lucent switches easy to configure for Genesys; however, most of my projects were with Meridian, so I am very comfortable with the latter one. Genesys actually based all the products on Meridian in the beginning, not Lucent, but with MLink discontinued and SLink still being in experimental stages (we are testing patch after patch), I think Ed has a very good point.

I do not believe I am saying this, but, maybe, just maybe, you need to think about having a different option besides Genesys, just in case Genesys will suddenly disappear two years later (I doubt it, but it is my job to make sure that our clients are covered no matter what). In this case, I would suggest G3, because of their CRM2000. I think it is much, much, much better than Symposium. Also, you need to keep in mind that most of Genesys competitors target Lucent as the main switch for their product. So, you will have a wider variety of options to consider should Genesys be a nogo.

Based on all of the things mentioned above go with Hicom ))) Just kidding!

With best wishes,
Vic

[Joseph Aiello]

Currently operate with a G3, other than the odd quirk everything runs quite smoothly in the 5.1 environment