Salvos adopt on-demand IP telephony

With a mission that spreads across every facet of social welfare, The Salvation Army Australia Eastern Territory (The Salvation Army AUE) has more than 350 diverse sites across New South Wales, ACT and Queensland.

There are three main sites in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, 40 major sites in NSW and Queensland and some 300 terminal sites across regional and metropolitan areas.

The Salvation Army AUE decided to streamline the management of this complex environment while taking advantage of the latest IP telephony advancements to enhance the communications of the organisation. While IP telephony was deemed to be the technology of choice, the obstacle was to be able to justify the large capital expenditure required to fund a project of this scale and complexity.

The diversity of sites makes the implementation project complex, and given the number of dedicated volunteers working with The Salvation Army AUE, training becomes a major challenge.

Integ is a participant in the Group Communications Tender (GCT), a panel arrangement under which Australian organisations can purchase communications solutions. As a GCT panel participant, Integ provides its on-demand IP telephony solution, iTaaS, and other panel participants deliver wide area network and carrier services.

Following The Salvation Army AUE’s competitive tender process for its wide area network, telephony system and mobile and fixed-call carrier services, GCT was successful, and Integ was chartered to deliver its iTaaS solution, based on a pay-by-month-per-user delivery model, rather than by an upfront capital investment.

Under iTaaS, The Salvation Army AUE’s communications network looks very different. The core telephony hardware, operating software and applications are hosted in a secure data centre and IP handsets are located wherever staff need them. Each handset links directly to the data centre using VoIP data links, after which calls are routed to the phone network. Along with basic features such as voicemail and call forwarding, iTaaS provides intelligent routing between offices to handle heavy incoming call loads.

As the reliability of the links to the data centre is essential, the solution incorporates media gateways and GSM gateways at key sites for added resilience. The gateways allow access for internal calls to the traditional phone network via ISDN or GSM links, to ensure business continuity in the unexpected event of the data centre links being unavailable.

In the initial phase of the project, The Salvation Army AUE has deployed 2000 VoIP handsets across 40 key sites and 300 terminal sites in New South Wales, Queensland and ACT. The rollout requires upgrading links to its sites from ADSL to symmetrical 512 Kbps SDSL and BDSL, and the local area networks at several sites have been upgraded to handle both voice and data traffic.

“Pay-by-the-month infrastructure pricing is attractive, but the true appeal of iTaaS is continual access to the latest technologies and features,” says Wayne Bajema, IT Manager, the Salvation Army AUE.

“Every dollar we spend on telecommunications is one dollar less we have to spend on our mission, and of course we want to maximise resources for our mission. While it turns a capital expenditure into an operational expense, iTaaS also enables us to maintain currency with the latest technology and more easily unify our communications systems.”