A routine phone system replacement for Australian insurance company MDA National** has evolved into a unified communications deployment with Nortel* [NYSE/TSX: NT], including the deployment of a 'virtual' contact centre that allows MDA staff to field calls from any customer anywhere in the country.

MDA initially consulted Nortel and its Platinum nPower channel partner Commander when it decided to switch from an old analogue phone system to IP telephony, but the project rapidly expanded beyond voice once the company saw the broad range of business benefits possible through Nortel's unified communications solutions.

The benefits included multimedia communications for click-to-call audio and videoconferences among staff in different offices, unified messaging for mobile staff to easily retrieve e-mail and voicemails remotely, and a complete IP-based ‘virtual’ contact centre that allows customer inquiries from any Australian city to be easily directed to the most appropriate staff member regardless of their physical location.

“As a relatively small company with 85 staff spread across multiple offices, we always struggled with directing incoming customer calls to the right staff because it was difficult to know which agents were available to take calls and whether they were in the office or on the road,” says Graham Owens, IT manager, MDA National. “Nortel’s solutions not only gave us features to link all our agents into a virtual contact centre but in combination with Nortel’s Quality-of-Service (QoS) enabled hardware, we are now able to guarantee the quality of voice calls across the data network.

“For us, the advantages of contracting a single vendor like Nortel for all our communication and networking needs were obvious; we would never have achieved the same level of functionality and integration at such an affordable price by contracting multiple vendors and multiple installers to come up with the same solution,” says Owens.

“A high percentage of companies in Australia are considered small-to-medium businesses, often with fewer than 100 staff but still running multiple offices spread across thousands of kilometers just like larger corporations. The challenge for them is having the same advanced communications tools as their larger competitors to connect their staff into single, cohesive organisations at a price they can afford,” says Mark Fioretto, general manager, Enterprise Solutions, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel.

“The challenge Nortel overcomes is delivering solutions that not only unify our customers’ communications, but also make it easy for staff and customers to connect with each other, be it by phone or video, and in real-time,” says Fioretto. “We’re working closely with our customers to make the transition to unified communications as simple as possible, which is even more critical in the age of Hyperconnectivity where people are no longer limited to single networked devices, but instead use multiple connected devices to do business.”

Nortel and Commander’s solution for MDA National includes a range of Nortel voice, data and contact centre products, including: Nortel Communication Server (CS) 1000, Nortel’s flagship unified communications platform, Nortel Multimedia Communications Server (MCS) 5100 software for voice and video conferencing from the desktop, Nortel 1140E IP handsets, Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 5520s, Nortel Call Pilot for unified messaging and Nortel’s comprehensive contact centre software suite, Contact Center 6.0.

“We’ll be upgrading to the latest version of MCS and the CS1000 later this year to introduce click-to-call video conferencing on the desktop and a higher level of business continuity for the phone system,” says Owens. “This will further enhance the benefits we’re already getting from the system, and even though we’ve had no downtime to date, will give us even more protection against unforeseen outages.”

Nortel continues to build its Enterprise momentum in 2008 across multiple industry sectors, with major voice and data sales to new customers like Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines, RMIT University, Wannon Water and Acsess Health.