Case Study – Health Systems Trust

Case Study – Health Systems Trust

Technology:
Avaya IP Office

Installed:
August 2014

Client Requirements:

HST had three main branches in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, with 15 satellite offices distributed around South Africa. The requirement was to provide a centralised telephony solution, with full redundancy between the three main nodes. SIP Trunking was to be deployed for outbound calls, and features like Hot Desking, Voice mail and call accounting reports were required per user. A centralised, PC Operator console is also required for the Head Office capable of answering calls for all sites.

Solution:

A&D based the design on the IP Office platform from Avaya. IP Office was capable of meeting the client’s requirements in terms of design, redundancy and feature set. With the Avaya IP Office capable of supporting up to 2500 extensions, and 64 sites, the client was more than comfortable that future growth was taken care of.

A&D designed the telephony network in conjunction with the WAN providers. The WAN was a 10 MB last mile fibre feed into a MPLS network. The MPLS allowed us to create an entirely separate Voice VLAN between the 3 x main nodes. This ensured that the allocated voice bandwidth was separated from the data, ensuring quality of service on the line. Each main node received an Avaya IP Office 500v2 controller, while the satellite sites all ran in a private cloud environment of the main controller in Westville.

The satellite sites proved the most challenging part of the installation, largely due to them being located in some very remote parts of South Africa. The last mile chosen for the satellites was a dedicated Voice ADSL line, and this was brought into the MPLS via a L2TP VPN tunnel to each. A POE data switch was deployed to each site to power the IP Phones, all of which registered back to the main controller.

Feature functionality like hot desking, number portability, distributed hunt groups and voicemail is provided for all users, and across the nodes. The Avaya IP Office Softconsole was used as the centralised operator console in Westville. This allowed the operator to answer calls for all nodes, and a central BLF panel representation allowed her to see the presence and status of all extensions within the organisation.

Redundancy was set up between the Avaya nodes, and allowed all IP phones to automatically sign onto an alternative controller in another region should their primary fail. With this all features and functionality automatically move with the user to its new host.

The Call Accounting was provided by Visual Software Architects RAMPAGE product. This allowed the collection of call records from all Avaya controllers to a centralised SQL database. All records were processed accordingly as per the carrier network, and call costs assigned to the relevant users based on their personal pin codes. All reports are automated on a monthly basis to the clients HR and management teams.

Client’s Response:

We found the team at A&D to be extremely professional and courteous during the installation of our Avaya system and they followed through equally well during our post installation interaction and training sessions. Their staff displayed the appropriate technical knowledge and skills required to complete our complex setup and we did not encounter any problems during this time. A&D communicated and followed up with our ICT company and other external service providers like Telkom , leaving us to concentrate on our core business. We received regular updates during the entire rollout so we were comfortable that the installation progressed well and the deadlines we set were not compromised. It has been well over a year since the installation was completed and to date we have not had any problems with the product itself or the workmanship at any of our offices.