Macquarie Telecom in fine voice with Opera Australia

Converged voice and data environment provides high performance backbone for customer service centres

Sydney, Australia – 5th July 2006 – Australia’s national opera company, Opera Australia, has signed a two-year deal with Macquarie Telecom for voice, data, mobile services and an IP-based PBX to support its planned migration to Voice over IP (VoIP).

Opera Australia is one of the world’s busiest opera companies, presenting some 700 performances each year to nearly 500,000 people nationally. During its Winter season between July and September its call centres in Sydney and Melbourne manage approximately 700 subscription and single ticket enquiries every day.

In 2005 Opera Australia began a major review of its information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, parts of which were 14 years old. It decided to increase its bandwidth as part of its plans to upgrade to more modern communications services.

Macquarie Telecom successfully pitched its Metro Access Network (MAN), which delivers high speed bandwidth with QoS (Quality of Service) traffic class managements and is therefore ideal for convergence of voice, data and internet traffic.

Opera Australia also selected an IP Telephony solution to be designed and deployed by integration specialists, NSC Enterprise Solutions. The NSC solution comprises Avaya Communication Manager 3.1 running on an S8300 media server with G700 gateways along with around150 IP phones. The Melbourne site will be configured for Local Survival Processing as part of the company’s business continuity plans.

According to Grant Cresswell, IT Manager, Opera Australia, the Macquarie Telecom high speed network allows Opera Australia to pursue its VoIP plans, which include reducing implementation and operation costs, gaining greater efficiencies and improving customer service.

“We required a low risk, cost effective and flexible method of refreshing our communication technology to expand the range of applications available within the organisation,” said Cresswell.

“Macquarie Telecom responded with a competitively priced solution that gave us the reliable, low latency and high uptime network we were looking for. It was well thought out and ‘outside the box’.”

Migration to convergence with Voice over IP

In 2005 Opera Australia began using a ticketing and customer relationship management application called Tessitura. This integrates telephony features such as caller ID and matches them to the CRM database.

“We have a long relationship with a lot of our clients and our call centre agents know them by name and interests,” explained Cresswell. “So we wanted a more personalised system, making it easier for subscribers to change subscriptions or performances.”

To support these changes, Opera Australia required a high-speed link between Sydney and Melbourne that met its current data requirements and would allow for VoIP traffic in the future.

“I believe VoIP gives us the biggest opportunity to serve our customers more effectively and presents significant savings,” he said. “The cheaper cost of data compared to using standard lines means we will get a return on our investment in a relatively short time.”

According to Cresswell, the fact Macquarie Telecom and NSC had an existing relationship positively influenced the vendor selection process and ensured system integration would be managed effectively.

In designing the solution, NSC has utilised Avaya technology to create a virtual environment for Opera Australia, a move away from the discrete systems and complex inter PBX/LAN/WAN networking currently in place. This single communications client/server solution allows Opera Australia to deliver communications services cost effectively to all users throughout the organisation. Data centre and disaster recovery benefits are provided via the centralisation of applications and servers for voice.

“The minimal infrastructure, reduced points of failure and single central point of administration will help us realise costs savings relatively quickly,” said Cresswell.

Single billing to deliver significant savings

Macquarie Telecom is also delivering Opera Australia, in-bound, out-bound, national and international voice calls, together with mobile services and its online fleet management tool, FleetView.

A key requirement of Opera Australia’s ICT review was to reduce expenditure on its telecommunications services. In the past the company received ten separate bills every month for data and voice services despite only dealing with a couple of providers. This meant extra administrative work consolidating budgets and dealing with separate customer service channels.

“We were prepared to break up various points of voice, mobile and data but Macquarie Telecom dovetailed it in a way that made lots of economic sense,” said Creswell. “Now we enjoy a single bill and a single point of control for voice, mobile and data – this will bring about massive saving from an administrative point of view.”

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For more information:
Mandy Galmes
N2N Communications
02 9213 2302
agalmes@n2n.com.au

About Macquarie Telecom

Macquarie Telecom is a leading supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions – including voice, data, mobile and hosting – specialising in the business and government markets. Its dedicated managed hosting and security facility, the Intellicentre, is certified to BS 7799 and DSD Gateway security standards.

Macquarie Telecom provides services to 3,000 business and government customers in Australia and Asia, supporting more than one million business users at work every day. Founded in July 1992, it is one of Australasia's first deregulated telecommunications companies. It expanded its operation into Asia in 2000, and holds carrier licenses in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.