atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Vertical Telephones & Systems Vertical Summit

As I continue to service the 100 or so Vodavi/Vertical legacy systems that I have in the field and find tech support a challenge to come by, me personally, I would never invest a penny in another Vertical product. I sell the SBX as a simple down and dirty key system, copper dial tones, square key or front ended by an Auto Attendant. Its cheap, it plays cheap and I am honestly too lazy to take the time to find another low end product. If they pull another discontinue on the SBX, I will find something else at the low end. We had a system go down last week at a multi site school district, the usual non sense with the battery on the MPB failed. We brought a spare card to site then realized it was a networked system and we cannot get a network SW code from Vertical so we had to field repair the battery. Can you imagine? These systems are barely 5 years old, no support. Vertical lost me a while ago and I am never going back to them on a system that is anything but low end and almost disposable.

I think your reply is a bit off the subject considering I started this thread as FYI about the Summit...what we know now and what some of us will learn in the future.

So far I have heard postivie things about it. I happen to be one who thinks that if the factory (in this case Ericsson-LG) makes a good product and Vertical provides complete documentation than technical support becomes less of an issue.

The purpose of this thread is to help us learn just how good it is.

How can they do symbols. Try taking that home to your wife and ask her what the symbols mean. I bet she guesses half wrong. This is our typical customer.

Jim, I don't like the symbols either. However, I've yet to hear a customer complain about them.

BTW, Nortel did symbols for years on the T-series.

Sorry that you found my reply "off subject". To my mind, the product is as good as the company that sells it, in fact, the company behind it is probably more important to me than the product itself, which is a commodity. If you take the Summit on, best of luck with it.

Is anybody registered for any of the Vertical Summit classes? Not the online sales but actual installation training classes?

Our's is 60 miles away in Los Angeles, Ca. Traffic's outrageous. One day class. I'll wait for the online class. Hopefully they will add it soon.

Heading to school tomorrow in DC. The drive doesn't bother me, but the hotel room rates are murder.

Just finished up my training in Orlando! Mario Hernandez was the instructor and did a great job with the limited time we had. I will start off by saying that I know much more about the product than I did before the training, but won't fully grasp everything until I "play" with it on my own time. It's really difficult to learn everything you need to know in a 1 day course. The programming methods are very similar to the SBX. The features are pretty much everything you could ask for.
Pros: Smart phone app,VM to Email WITH a wave file, call accounting that will open in excel (so no 3rd party software needed), supports nearly every digital and voip Vodavi phone since the Infinite line, supports up to 140 stations (48 digital max),74 CO lines (24 analog loop start max),hybrid ports that use the inside pair for digital and outside pair for analog, it will network with the MBX and SBX, and my favorite new feature is that it can have up to 48 dect phones. The system has a WTIB card with 4 ports to connect wireless base units to and extend the range of the dect phones. I tested this at the training and can say that they work indoors at about 150' from the base unit (through several walls). They are supposed to work at about 300 meters in an open environment, so you could space these base units out and have a considerable amount of coverage. They will also automatically switch from one base unit to another if you walk out of range of one of them (awesome!).

Cons: You have a choice of 2 different KSU's. The KSUAD and the KSUID. The KSUID supports PRI and the KSUAD does not. If you install a the KSUAD and later on want to switch to a PRI, you must replace the KSU (Not Cool). It's sometimes hard to determine what a particular customer may want or need down the line. Why not install a KSUID every time and not worry about it? It's more expensive than the KSUAD and may over-bid you out of a potential customer. I'm not a big fan of licensing and there seems to be a lot of that with this system. You can get a 30 day license to unlock everything so the customer can see what features they want / like and they can choose which ones are beneficial to them(This is a "pro"). I'm not a huge fan of having to use the modular installation amphenol cable (like the SBX). I saw nothing else that I didn't like.
Overall, I am excited to get started with this new product. I also understand they are working on coming out with the same type of product that will have a much larger capacity. Hope this helps for those on the fence about this product.

Thanks Don. I can't attend an out-of-state certification course to be able to sell the Summit and on-line certification isn't buttoned down yet. So yesterday, I took a local 1-day course in the NEC SL1100. It looks like everyone is interested in having smart phone apps.

I do hope the larger product will be available through distribution. Not that I have many large applications anymore, but the last thing I want to do is have a customer outgrow an SL1100 and then lose them to an SV8100 dealer. The capacity of networking our XTS-IPs was huge!