IP Telephony

IP Telephony Featured Article

The city of Prescott, Arizona (2003 population: 38,244) has a pretty welcoming motto: “Everybody’s Hometown.” Making this hominess possible takes, at times, some pretty sophisticated technology. (Not that sophisticated technology needs to be complicated to use.) That’s why the city recently selected Mitel (News - Alert) as its unified communications vendor to link together all the municipalities departments and buildings using an IP telephony system.

 

Previously, the 23 separate phone and voicemail systems used by Prescott’s municipal employees were not really helping to make the city more efficient in the mission to serve it citizens.

 

“Our communications was a patchwork of many different systems which needed to be streamlined and cost-controlled,” said Nate Keegan, Prescott’s operations manager, in a statement.

 

Keegan, was tasked with improving this situation by finding and deploying an IP-based platform capable of linking together 600 employees in all municipal buildings and departments (including police and fire). In the ensuing bid process, Mitel came out on top. Keegan chose the following products from Mitel to make the unified communications vision for Prescott a reality:

 

The result? Greatly enhanced communications between city staff and citizens, and reduced costs to boot.

 

 “With NuPoint Messenger IP we have centralized voice mail for the first time, which allows city employees to respond to each other and, more importantly, to our residents much more quickly than we were able to before,” Keegan said. “And the 5550 IP Console incoming calls list allows our front-desk attendants at city hall to prioritize incoming calls based on the information they see on the screen right in front of them.”

 

Mitel president and COO Paul Butcher praised the City of Prescott’s forward-looking approach to communications.

 

“Prescott has shown it’s possible to save the taxpayers money while enhancing services,” Butcher said in a statement. “As the city grows, Mitel’s scalable and flexible solutions will expand with it.”

 

Keegan, meanwhile, had nothing but good things to say about the Mitel products he chose for the city.

 

“All in all, it is hard to overstate, on my end, the difference between pre-Mitel and post-Mitel for our organization,” he said in a statement. “It is literally like night and day. This is due to the quality of the Mitel products and also directly attributable to the quality of service and support we have gotten from Mitel during the cutover process. My life would be much easier if all of my vendors were as easy to work with as Mitel.”

 

To learn more about Mitel’s IP telephony and presence solutions, please visit the company’s TMCnet.com channels, IP Telephony and Presence.