Telephony - Major savings tapped by water infrastructure firm

A major water and wastewater infrastructure specialist has tapped into a six figure saving after Pennine upgraded its telephony network.

Award-winning KMI+ reports that a vital upgrade from its existing Avaya Aura Communications Manager to the latest edition is saving it hundreds of pounds in monthly line rental costs alone at each of its 54 sites across the North West.

Those savings have been secured through switching from traditional landlines to internet telephony as KMI+’s IT Director Ian Johnson explains: “We’ve stopped putting individual lines in on site and instead are connecting using VoIP across an MPLS network so management is centralised and we’re no longer bearing the cost of inter-site calls.

“We’ve not got figures on those call savings because the usage varies so much but we know we’re saving around a couple of hundred pounds per site, per month just on rental charges. With 54 sites this represents considerable savings.”

Whilst cost is a significant advantage yielded by the ACM upgrade it’s by no means the only one. The initial motivation for installing an enhanced system was simple: KMI+ was expanding and the old system, reaching end of life, couldn’t satisfy their growth with the number of handsets to be supported increasing 75 percent from 200 to 350. The new system takes that well in its stride with a capability to host up to 10,000 handsets.

Better still deployment of those telephones is now much easier, thanks to plug and play technology which allows users to easily access local IP endpoints. “It’s just PIN code in, PIN code out and they take the number with them so it gives us portability” says Mr. Johnson. “It’s really convenient and provides staff with access to the telephone system regardless of whether they are at their desk or working from any of our other 53 sites.”
 

The upgrade itself was completed with the minimum of fuss. “It was seamless. The engineer came in, exported the data from one system to the other and we were up and running within about an hour,” recalls Mr. Johnson who added further praise for Pennine. “They’ve been very good, very responsive,” he concludes.