One of South Africa's leading supply chain management providers, Digistics, recently partnered with KSS Technologies for an important countrywide infrastructure upgrade which saw the company migrate to an IP telephony system from its previous analogue-based PABX system.
The company's infrastructure, which encompasses seven offices based in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, now features Cisco Unified Communications Manager, CallManager 6.1 which is the software-based call-processing component of the Cisco IP telephony solution.
Essentially, the software extended Digistics' telephony features and functions to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice over IP gateways, and multimedia applications.
The challenge
Digistics had been experiencing significant business expansion and in order to meet the resultant requirements that come with growth "it became clear that our old system could not cope with the demands of a growing business which is why we decided to upgrade to Cisco's IP telephony infrastructure," explains Alan Jordaan, IT manager at Digistics.
"Following our decision to go the IP route we opted to partner with KSS as they came highly recommended by a well-known multinational customer which they had provided services to. It was also evident that the Cisco offering provided us with the solution that met our communication requirements."
"By deploying Cisco CallManager, Digistics could start reaping the benefits such as improved usability, cost-saving and infrastructure maintenance that come with deploying an IP telephony system," says Corne Sassenberg, Senior Account Manager at KSS Technologies.
The solution
Utilising Digistics' existing infrastructure, the Cisco solution was deployed via wireless and fibre channel to the company's five offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town. CallManager provides the central management from which the company runs its IP Telephony network.
The rollout to Digistics' offices in Johannesburg, for example, took less than three days to complete.
A new infrastructure which runs the IP telephony system was also installed at Digistics' two new offices in Durban. "The implementation in Durban was completed in no time as there was no need to install two points as one runs both the telephone system and network, which undoubtedly saved time," explains Jordaan.
The benefits
"One of the biggest benefits was that we were able to run our analogue system concurrently with the new IP-based one which allowed us to switch over gradually without any disruption to our users," says Jordaan.
Digistics employees underwent the necessary training to use the system and the IP phones. "Although we went through a bit of a teething phase, the reaction has been very positive so far. The IP phones, for example, are user-friendly and therefore easy to work which definitely helped with the transition process," he adds.
Digistics will continue to partner with KSS for the necessary support and maintenance of the IP Telephony system and voice environment.
Share