[August 28, 2003]

Philly Coke Chooses Harbor Technologies For Next-Gen Communications Platform

Harbor Technologies announced the company has been chosen by the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company to create a next-generation communications platform that increases employee mobility and functionality, while greatly reducing telephone charges. The IP-based telephony system enables Philly Coke employees to call colleagues or customers within the greater Philadelphia area without paying toll charges, and allows them to track all communications through a unified messaging system.

The new telephony system, based on Cisco Systems' Call Manager technology, simplifies management by replacing the seven traditional PBX phone systems at Philly Coke's locations in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey with one centrally administered system. To prepare for the telephony system, Harbor designed and implemented an extensive network upgrade to a multi-gigabit backbone using redundant fiber optic cabling at the headquarters and dual T1 connectivity to Philly Coke's remote locations.

Philly Coke employees will have greater mobility because their "virtual office" can travel with them to any branch location. Staffers can enter their IDs on any phone to customize it to their preferences; the phone instantly adopts their extension and gives access to their speed dial numbers. Philly Coke expects to experience tremendous savings in phone call charges from the Harbor Technologies' telephony installation, according to Mark Hall, manager of networks and operations at Philly Coke.

Hall says the majority of the savings will come from the system's intelligent routing of calls, which directs calls across the company network to the Philly Coke location closest to the recipient before connecting to the public telecommunications network, thereby reducing or eliminating toll charges. "Thanks to Harbor's telephony implementation, our sales staff in Philadelphia will be able to make calls to customers in New Jersey that will actually initiate from a nearby branch office, saving us a tremendous amount in monthly phone bills."

"Based on our six years of working with Harbor Technologies on a number of innovative networking projects, we knew they were the right vendor to develop a flexible communications platform that prepares us for the next decade of advances in technology," said Hall. The new platform also eliminates the redundancy of managing separate voice and data lines for the company's 500 desktops by sending all communications over a single network. Because network administrators can log onto and easily manage the system from any PC, the company does not need a dedicated phone specialist.

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