If I was going to have to look at one more website listing IP conference stations, I was prepared to commit hari-kari. When I was saddled with this project– finding the right phone system to upgrade to for our small company—I wasn’t particularly daunted. How hard could it be? I thought. A phone system’s a phone system. Not.
After what seemed like weeks clicking through website after website, I finally decided that we should go with a Cisco model. Cisco is the industry leader in IP telephony and they’re also the company that manufactures all of our switches and routers so I knew they were reliable. But they also produce hundreds of models of phones so making the one firm decision about Cisco did little to narrow my list.
I made a list of the features I knew we wanted in a phone system. We wanted all the standard business features like mute, call transfer, call hold… the basics. That was easy. Pretty much all the options had those. But we also wanted more complex features like full-duplex operation with state-of-the-art acoustic technology. We wanted the phones to have integrated keypads and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (a fancy way of saying the phone would have the ability to auto address configuration to the network). We also were looking for a system that worked on a single cable so we wouldn’t have a mess of cables on everyone’s tables and desks. And we wanted it to work like a regular telephone. Some of these systems you actually have to train staff to be able to use them properly. Sorry, we don’t have time in our busy day to be training people how to use a phone.
Well, I finally found the right choice: the Cisco Station 7936. It was perfect. Everything we wanted.
But it was expensive. My boss loved the CP-7936 I’d found, but wasn’t prepared to pay the $1,900 Cisco was charging for the system. The idea of going back to the drawing board and starting over was daunting, so I decided to find a way to get us the Cisco Station 7936 for under a grand (my boss was willing to pay that). Since Cisco doesn’t negotiate prices (who can blame them? Most manufacturer/retailers don’t), I had to be creative. But my creativity paid off.
Once I knew what I wanted and how much we were willing to pay, I quickly came upon the website for MULTI-LINK Communications Products – a leading alternate provider of Cisco equipment. I found the CP-7936 (the exact same model we wanted from Cisco) on MLCP’s site for $600 on their specials page. At first I was worried that my boss would not go for a refurbished phone system, but after showing him that MLCP provides a one-year warranty on all refurbished equipment they sell, he was completely on board. I talked to the rep at MLCP and realized that we could save even more money by selling them our current phone system which we had outgrown a long, long time ago. The trade-in credit meant an even bigger savings and we received our telephony equipment faster than we would have had we bought new from Cisco.
So the story has a happy ending. With the money I saved, I think I deserve a healthy merit increase at my next review, so the ending may get even happier. We’ll know in about six months.