Energy industry firm VirCom Energy Management Systems is one company pleased to have headed down the hybrid path to IP telephony. The company has 130 staff and provides contracting services to energy retailers nationally.
It has installed an Alcatel OMNI PBX telephony solution supplied by Commspec at its biggest office in Auckland and intends to roll out subsystems to its four other offices in Hawke's Bay, Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch over the next 18 months. The systems replace older Nitsukio analogue PBXs.
CEO Craig Shepherd says with a hybrid solution the company has been able to re-use existing infrastructure and can move to VoIP at its leisure. It hasn't implemented any VoIP handsets yet, using a combination of 30 digital and a dozen analogue handsets at its Auckland office.
Shepherd says he is very happy with the solution and Commspec's service. "It’s absolutely brilliant, the best thing we've done for a long time, and the features are mind-blowing. They went the extra mile."
Benefits have included being able to have hunt and seek groups and more automated front-end systems to have calls directed into the right divisions of the company, he says.
For the future, statistical sampling and being able to link the five offices together over VoIP are a couple of aspects that will be valuable.
Shepherd says a key reason he went for Alcatel was that it is basically a server running on Linux. On the network front VirCom works with integrator Network Service Providers (NSP). It has a Microsoft Terminal Server then client solutions using PCs and Linux terminals built by NSP. Allied Teleson switches are in use and VirCom uses Telecom Private Office networking between sites.
The firm has developed in-house a paperless job delivery system called Rapid Data and does 15,000 jobs a month through it. In respect to this Telecom's 3G network has proven a boon for remote access, as the company has found GPRS and CDMA data connections did not provide sufficient bandwidth. "With T3G we can work remotely anywhere," says Shepherd.
The company also uses ruggedised cell phones and PDA's. Shepherd says for these he'll go with whatever brand is the best value at the time of purchase and uses a combination of Telecom's CDMA and Vodafone's GPRS.
NSP provides a server product called Xen, which has been used to merge a number of servers together and provides for fast upgrading and instantaneous failover backups, which Shepherd says in one case enabled a switch over of its mail server within 2 minutes following a component failure. "We've now got critical failover across our whole system."
He says the company has doubled its size in the past two years and NSP has provided exceptional service, particularly when something is needed to be done urgently. "You can imagine the level of change needed."
- Telecommunications Review February 27 - March 26, 2006