Taking a RISC with VoIP

Aldo Travia thought he’d bitten off more than he could chew when he took on the task of overhauling the telephony system of UNIX infrastructure specialist Total RISC Technology.

Brand new to the company in the role of COO, Travia had six weeks in which to deploy VoIP across TRT’s offices in four different states, with the Melbourne office re-locating at the same time.

“It was a daunting task,” Travia says. “I had only just walked into the company and wanted to make a good impression under tough circumstances. In fact the rollout agenda was so tough, I wasn’t sure it would happen.”

Travia chose an IP telephony system from Zultys; lesser known than the two competing tenders Nortel and Cisco. “My main concern wasn’t price, although that was where I started. They [Zultys] just seemed more customer-service focused and I felt they would bend over backwards to help me deliver to the business what I had promised,” Travia says.

Zultys channel partner Leaderboard IT did the VoIP installation. “We put in a MX250 (the main IP PBX) in Sydney and an MX25 (a mini-IP PBX) in Melbourne and SIP-based Zultys phones,” says David Humphries, director of Leaderboard IT.

It’s been a few months now since the VoIP rollout finished, and user feedback from TRT employees shows that instant messaging and teleconferencing is a hit, and users like the fact that they can set their own call-handling rules.

Conference calls between offices can be done without an external provider and it’s free, over the Internet.

TRT’s mobile sales staff also have VoIP functionality on their laptops, by way of Zultys’ soft phones. They get full access to both voice and data services when they’re away from the office.

The relatively painless transition came down to lots of serious preparation. “Planning is essential,” says Humphries. “Without proper planning you can’t set expectations and there could have been financial impacts.”

Good user-training helps minimise resistance to change. “If people have been with an organisation for some time, regardless of how useless an old phone system becomes, it’s what they’re used to. So user-training and familiarisation is definitely something you want to factor into any VoIP implementation,” Humphries says.

From the channel partner’s point of view, Humphries says the main thing he was looking for in Zultys was a product that did what it said it was going to do and was easy to install.

“The planning stage is hard enough as it is…but if you start hitting problems all the time, you’re going to start losing money. Zultys was so easy to install, we essentially had the Sydney office up and running in a day.”

As for the future, if TRT expands and wants to bring new branch offices online at any stage, “they’ve got the confidence they can turn on a new branch’s VoIP phone systems in a day,” he says. 

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