Investment company reaps the benefits of IP Telephony

According to Information Technology Manager, Shannon Overs, the new telephony solution provides a robust platform for the company’s planned growth as well as significantly enhancing customer service and increasing staff satisfaction and productivity.  Thanks to the inclusion of in-house teleconferencing, an added bonus is the saving of more than $18,000 per annum previously spent on out-sourcing this activity.

 “Our existing Ericsson BCS150 PABX had reached the end of its useful life,” said Overs. “We could no longer add new extensions, couldn’t purchase spare parts and had no voicemail capability.”

PIS undertook extensive research of the communications market and approached Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. According to Overs, the Avaya solution best suited the needs of the business both in the short and long term.

The new IP Telephony infrastructure comprises Avaya G350 gateways in Sydney and Melbourne; G250 gateways in Adelaide and Perth, 600 IP handsets and a mirror solution of S8500 media server and G700 gateways in both the Gold Coast head office and Brisbane location providing full business continuity.

“If something untoward was to happen to our Gold Coast facility, communications for the rest of the world would fail-over to Brisbane within three minutes,” said Overs.

To date, PIS has rolled out the Avaya solution across 250 seats in Australia, 300 seats in Singapore and 20 seats each in Beijing, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and New Zealand.

The in-house convenience of Avaya’s Meet-me conferencing solution is proving a great hit with senior executives. This was previously outsourced which not only cost the company as much as $3000 per month but also meant all calls are routed internally over PIS’s global private network reducing toll costs.

Additional benefits derived from the Avaya solution include a move to ISDN, provision of voicemail, remote access, toll bypass, call routing and direct-in-dial numbers.

As part of its communications refresh, PIS has also upgraded its data network running a full fibre network across the country with UECOMM, redesigned its Private IP network to cater for voice, rolled out new Huawei Layer 3 switches and is currently installing Polycom for video conferencing in all boardrooms across the world.

The next phase of the implementation will see PIS install call recording solution providing improved compliance with financial regulations.