Hi Shako,
The traditional reasons why you would chose a Cisco solution (or other major manufacture for that reason) would be things like:
- Reliability
- Quality
- Security
- Manageability
However, there needs to be a cost/benefit trade off in order to fully understand if such a paid solution with be of true value to you. At the end of the day, it depends on what you want to achieve, what type of users you have, you available budgets, current infrastructure, experience........ and on.
In my opinion, in some areas Cisco simply price themselves out of contention. Sure multinational global corporations will probably pay these costs, but even for other organisation (even those that are quite large), these cost might make people baulk at the prices. I work in the public sector (such as Higher Education and local government) and whilst we employ a lot of Cisco equipment (such as endpoints and VCS devices), other costs proposed by Cisco for things like Lync 2013 integration through the VCSs is simply preposterous to us (potentially £40-50k per organisation) and the organisation we manage. As such we will look at other solutions until Cisco figures this out.
The long and short of it is you get what you pay for - at least with regard to the endpoints. A videoconferencing solution always gives a much better experience for the users that something like Skype, Google Hangouts or GoToMyMeeting and the like. The is still an need for these applications, but they do not replace a traditional videoconferencing setup.
Chris
. Thanks Weyne.