When Apollo Hospitals, a healthcare provider in India, wanted to connect its 51 hospitals across the country, it turned to a Matrix IP phone solution.

The company in particular wanted to connect its headquarters in Bannerghatta to Jayanagar hospital, while upgrading to IP telephony.

In particular, it wanted seamless connectivity between the two facilities, while maintaining lower communication costs. Apollo Hospitals also wanted to make sure the system met their current needs as well as being able to grow in the future.

The company maintains over 10,000 beds across its hospitals, as well as over 1500 pharmacies and 100 diagnostic clinics.

Their current phone system did not meet their needs.

Matrix offered a solution based around its ETERNITY LE - IP Phone (News - Alert) System. The system supports up to 1,500 users at once at Apollo’s Bannerghatta headquarters. It can also connect to other locations using IP networking, as well as PRI and GSM connectivity for outbound calls. End-users make calls over Matrix phones.

The system at the Bannerghatta facility connects to an existing ETERNITY ME billing system at the Jayanagar hospital.

The new phone system not only supported more users and connected the two facilities, but reduced billing up to 45 percent. Employees can also reach each other by dialing four-digit short codes rather than having to put in full telephone numbers. All of these features add up to greater productivity at lower costs.

The Matrix deployment shows how cost-effective and capable modern phone systems based on VoIP are. They can offer much cheaper pricing and more flexible options than traditional wireline telephony. As many people in the developing world who were underserved or not served at all with conventional telephony discovered mobile telephony, it seems that VoIP is changing the face of communications there as well. Even as western companies embrace VoIP, it looks poised to change communications around the world.