Business10.04.2013

Banking embraces cloud telephony

Recognising vast cost benefits, quality, business assurance, flexibility and control

One of South Africa’s biggest retail banks, noted for its innovative use of technology, has again moved ahead of the competition with a cloud-based PBX solution from Connection Telecom.

The Telviva platform provides the basis for easy group-wide rollout of a centralised voice over IP (VoIP) architecture, with numerous benefits, says a bank spokesperson.

Control, freedom of choice and flexibility
David Meintjes, Connection Telecom Managing director, says the bank specified a private cloud configuration – hosted, operated and supported by the bank on its premises. “This gave them unfettered control over their own system, including provisioning of sites and users.” To make this a realistic proposition, Connection Telecom provided administrator training to bank staff.

The bank also favoured Telviva’s open-standards solution architecture. “This gives them the freedom to choose any standards-based brand of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) handset; add or migrate to other open-standards technology when the time comes; or have Telviva coexist with other technology,” explains Lith.

Further flexibility is evident in the fact that the Connection Telecom solution can scale up or down as required (e.g. to match seasonal demand). “Given the scale of this project in all its phases, the hosted VoIP model suits us perfectly, offering comparatively low upfront cost as well as controlled, predictable ongoing expenditure,” comments the bank’s spokesman.

Existing relationship
The engagement builds on an existing relationship between the companies. Connection Telecom has provided consulting on high-end clustered voice implementations – also hosted within the bank’s data centre.

Connection Telecom was also asked to integrate a division of the bank’s mobile telephony into the VoIP network, making free mobile VoIP calls to staff possible.

Lith explains that the corporate telephony portion slots into the same data centre environment – but is effectively ring-fenced from the external service.

Cost-effective enterprise calls
The bank says the current engagement offers four key benefits:
• It allows free client service calls to a 087 number to access bank services.

In short, the bank has had considerable commercial benefit and flexibility from the solution, without sacrificing control and quality.

Powerful
The spokesman expresses the bank’s happiness with the collaboration. “Connection Telecom is a professional service provider with a large amount of experience in the industry. They helped us to get where we are now, and will certainly assist us in future again.

“We view Telviva as a powerful solution that allows group-wide rationalisation of our massive inventory of on-site corporate and branch PBX infrastructure, and also allowed us to assign non-geographic numbers to staff, for secure, quality-assured, low-cost corporate telephony – internally and externally.”

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