Voice + Data Best of 2011

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E C N E G R E V CON S E R T EN C A DAT NG I K R O W T E N

BEST OF 2011

CASE STUDIES SHOWCASE

TY I R U SEC 36 GE A R O N ST O I T A 38 IS L A U VIRT 42 SS E L E WIR 44

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TABCORP GAINS EFFICIENCIES FROM STREAMLINING ACCOUNTS PAYABLE

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s Australia’s premier gaming, wagering, hospitality and entertainment group, Tabcorp manages over a dozen leading brands, including Sydney’s Star City Casino, Jupiter’s Queensland Casinos, TAB, Tabaret, Keno, Sportsbet and Sky Channel/Sky Radio.

After launching a major business initiative to streamline its group operations and centralise HR and Finance shared services, Tabcorp chose to outsource part of its accounts payable function to Fuji Xerox Australia’s Global Services division in 2008. Tabcorp has since been able to automate several workflow processes and introduce greater transparency within the accounts payable process.

Today, of the quarter of a million invoices the company receives per annum, 50% are automatically verified for payment, resulting in greater efficiencies and increased supplier satisfaction.

Prior to establishing a centralised shared services model, Tabcorp had seven accounts payable departments operating across multiple locations, resulting in inconsistencies in policies and procedures. In addition, the accounts payable team had to manually process the 250,000 supplier invoices the company receives annually by email, fax and post. Tabcorp sought to introduce greater efficiencies across its account payable function.

Matthew Keegan, General Manager of Procurement at Tabcorp, explained that the company wanted a solution that would provide it with greater control and visibility of the accounts payable process every step of the way.

“The accounts payable team did not have the tools to deal with the sheer volume of invoices we received,” said Keegan. “We needed a solution that gave us greater transparency and accountability of the accounts payable process and would ultimately make the whole process more efficient.”

"We chose Fuji Xerox Global Services as our preferred outsourcing partner because the team is very experienced and demonstrated the ability to customise and deliver market-leading tools that aligned with our objectives."

When faced with the decision to outsource part of its accounts payable function or purchase software to continue managing this process in house, Tabcorp turned to Fuji Xerox Global Services for help.

As Tabcorp’s chosen outsourcing provider, Fuji Xerox Global Services worked closely with the company to deliver an accounts payable solution that would meet its business objectives and introduce greater process efficiencies. The first step was to implement best-ofbreed software solutions to digitise supplier invoices and automate the workflow process as much as possible.

Once key data and images within supplier invoices are captured electronically, the information is automatically cross-referenced against the company’s Oracle ERP finance system.

As Tabcorp operates in a highly government regulated industry, it was crucial that data security and compliance were maintained. Fuji Xerox Global Services established a purpose-built invoice-processing centre at Tabcorp’s headquarters in Melbourne, with a dedicated team handling the high volume of supplier invoices.

According to Keegan, outsourcing this part of the accounts payable process has enabled the company to take full advantage of the expertise and competencies of an experienced services provider. “We chose Fuji Xerox Global Services as our preferred outsourcing partner because the team is very experienced and demonstrated the ability to customise and deliver market-leading tools that aligned with our objectives,” said Keegan.

Tabcorp has found that having an outsourced partner on site has been extremely beneficial as Fuji Xerox Global Services is better able to understand Tabcorp’s business and workflow. Sue Davis, Accounts Payable Manager at Tabcorp, engages with the on-site Fuji Xerox Global Services team on a daily basis. “Any issues or problems are resolved much more quickly as the team is right here; and because of their day-to-day insight, they can quickly figure out what’s gone wrong and how to solve the problem,” said Davis. “It allows my team to really tap into the experience of the consultants we work with.”

In shifting this manual process to an online model, Tabcorp has achieved greater transparency of the entire accounts payable workflow as invoices can be tracked at every stage, from data entry through to payment.

“In an ideal world, we’ll have what I call ‘touchless AP’ which would see all of our processes automated and payments being made without the accounts team ever having to get involved,” concluded Keegan.

Fuji Xerox Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/H594

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PRINT REVIEW RESCUES WATER RETAILER FROM PAPER FLOOD

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ollowing an internal print review and subsequent print technology implementation, Victorian water retailer South East Water has dramatically reduced CO2 emissions, cut the amount of paper used per person and removed headaches suffered by its IT department.

South East Water is owned by the Victorian Government and is one of Melbourne’s three metropolitan water retailers. The company provides water and sewerage solutions to deliver sustainable and innovative outcomes for the community.

As part of an internal review, South East Water found that printing was an aspect of the business that caused significant headaches for the IT department.

It was the organisation’s third-biggest IT issue by the volume of calls placed to the help desk. With more than 120 non-standardised printers, scanners and fax machines, there were a fair few issues in managing all the different makes and models, too.

South East Water sought expertise around management of its print fleet. After testing the market for managed multifunction print services, South East Water selected Canon to provide recommendations on how it could achieve its objectives for its print and document management environment.

Canon implemented its uniFlow and eMaintenance products at South East Water. Now, the water retailer’s printing costs can be closely and accurate tracked, while preventative maintenance ensures the machines are always operating at their optimum, and consumables are automatically ordered in a timely fashion.

"Since implementation, we have halved the energy consumed by our print fleet and reduced annual paper usage by 2100 sheets per person, per year."

With the solution’s ‘follow-me printing’ functionality, the business is able to monitor and control its print fleet by changing the behaviour of its employees. One of the solution’s key features is the print-release function, where all employees must swipe an identity card before their print job is released. Any print jobs that are not released within 24 hours are automatically deleted.

“Before introducing follow-me printing, employees would often print something out and then get called into a meeting or simply forget about it, leaving paper stacked up next to the printer to be recycled or to go straight into the bin. Now those print jobs never see the light of day, with staff only printing when they really need to,” says Stuart Brockwell, IT operations manager, South East Water.

This identity card-based system has also increased document security. One of the concerns associated with consolidating the print fleet came from employees who dealt with confidential information and relied on having their own printer for security. But now, print jobs are only released when the employee is present and swipes in for access, removing the need to ‘print-and-sprint’ to the machines. With the new system, departmental and individual printing habits are visible to the business too, down to the level of print costs per user or department. By issuing print usage reports and attributing the associated cost to every department, awareness of the financial impact of printing has increased dramatically. Simple options such as setting all printers to black and white and duplex by default has also significantly reduced paper usage.

The system has allowed South East Water to reduce its number of print devices from more than 120 to just 15.

“Since the implementation, we have halved the energy consumed by our print fleet and reduced annual paper usage by 2100 sheets per person, per year,” Brockwell says.

Overall, the print system has resulted in a 60 tonne reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions. Also, printing has dropped from third to fifteenth place in help desk issues by volume.

“The consolidation not only achieved the project objectives, but it gave our IT team peace of mind.

We no longer have to worry about managing our print fleet and are able to concentrate on our core business,” Brockwell says.

Canon Australia Pty Ltd wf.net.au/K499

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Managed IT contract pays off before first bill is paid Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute was in an odd position: its servers were working perfectly, but had run out of warranty. The company was not in a financial position to replace the servers, however, so it instead engaged a third party to manage the equipment, supported by service level agreements (SLAs).

Baker IDI is a leading health and medical research institute, dedicated to reducing ill health and mortality caused by the effects of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The need for reliable IT servers is paramount to the work done within the institute, with invaluable research data that needs to be readily accessible at all times.

It was for this reason that Baker IDI turned to Australian systems availability specialist Interactive, to supply critical maintenance support to the out-ofwarranty IBM server equipment at its Prahran head office and additional IT equipment in Alice Springs.

“It was too risky for us to continue using the out-of-warranty equipment in case anything went wrong; however, we just weren’t in a financial position to replace perfectly good IT hardware,” explains Rachael Dalton, Chief Information Officer, Baker IDI. “Interactive provided the perfect solution to our problem, providing a straightforward hardware maintenance agreement which ensured

our equipment would be supported by dedicated engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Dalton.

Interactive provided an SLA for Baker IDI, with a guaranteed two-hour, on-site response from a dedicated engineer and 100% parts availability.

The institute needed to call on Interactive’s services only two days after they’d signed the contract, to respond to a server issue.

“We had to utilise Interactive’s services before the ink had dried on our contract and before we’d even paid our first bill; the turnaround was fantastic.

It immediately confirmed to my team and I that we’d chosen the right company - we were really impressed with the responsiveness of the team and the knowledge of the on-ground engineer,” Dalton says.

According to Dalton, one of the other major benefits of working with Interactive is the simplicity of making any changes to their agreement.

“Our initial agreement with Interactive wasn’t very complex, so there was no need in the beginning for any significant changes to our contract. However, as time has passed, we have needed to add new items of equipment to our hardware, which is such a seamless process with Interactive,” says Dalton. wf.net.au/K191

Interactive

Information management company reaps $150k pa saving Recall, an Australian secure document backup and destruction company, recently reevaluated its own printing environment and found it to be inefficient. Following an audit of the environment, Recall is now saving $150,000 each year on print management.

Recall boasts some of Australia’s leading banks, healthcare providers and technology companies within its customer base, all of whom rely on Recall to securely store, manage, destruct and/or backup their valuable data and customer information.

The company employs more than 1000 people across Australia. To meet its print requirements, Recall Australia was using more than 320 printers, copiers and scanners across its 42 offices.

Regular office orders were being placed for toner - often in excess of requirements - and unused paper and cartridges sat in storage for lengthy periods of time. The business had more than 60 different vendor relationships in operation, each with unique service agreements, invoices and maintenance rosters to be managed at any one time.

The sheer number of vendor relationships meant the company couldn’t easily adapt

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its device fleet to suit changing business requirements. In addition, the inconsistent deployment of solutions across different areas of the business meant that costs were varied and it was difficult to accurately chargeback costs to departments and profit and loss owners.

Recall Australia engaged Upstream Print Solutions to conduct a review of its existing printing and document management environment. Following the audit, Upstream designed a solution that allowed Recall to reduce the number of devices in its fleet from 320 to 140, all of which are managed by Upstream. The solution is supported by service level agreements (SLAs) for uptime and speed of service response.

“We achieved great cost savings, but more than this it was Upstream’s ability to streamline our business process and reduce the burden on the IT department that added real value,” says Simon Hughes, Commercial Manager for Recall Australia.

As a result of the new system, Recall has achieved a 30% reduction in print management costs per annum - a saving of more than $150,000 per year.

T h e co m p a n y n ow h a s i m p rove d accountability and more effective print cost allocation, thanks to interdepartmental print volume reports. Cash flow management has also improved, with the conversion of upfront device costs and monthly fees (like toner and maintenance) to fixed rental fees.

The solution reduced the number of printing manufacturers from 14 to just two and the number of different printer models from 60 down to 10. This has reduced helpdesk enquiries and allowed the IT team to resolve them much quicker.

Upstream Print Solutions wf.net.au/K286

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Mining consultancy suite on business software

KRC Mining Consultants has implemented a suite of Oracle software spanning enterprise resource planning, human resources, financials, document management and project management.

KRC is a consultancy specialising in the needs of mining and resource processing firms. It provides geological, geotechnical, mining engineering and costing services to the mining industry in Australia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and India. Based in Sydney, KRC has a team of 12 consultants.

“Our consultants get their hands dirty, often working at mining projects in remote parts of the world. The software systems we originally had in place for tracking projects were cumbersome, with data entry and manual sharing of information taking up significant amounts of our consultants’ day,” says Steve Franklin, CEO for KRC. “After growing strongly for several years, we found ourselves hitting a productivity wall using our old […] system and struggled to produce timely reports on project profitability, so we decided to look for a platform capable of supporting our growth,” he says.

After evaluating solutions from several software vendors, Dataweave was chosen to design, integrate and provide ongoing, remotely managed, support services for an Oracle E-Business Suite solution.

The solution incorporates modules to handle project costing, project tracking, project billing, consultant timesheets, accounting,

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financial reporting, document management and key human resources functions. All data is held in an Oracle database.

Employees can access the system via web browser from any location, using a secure sockets layer virtual private network (SSL-VPN).

The automatic integration of data between the modules of the suite has allowed KRC to improve both consultant productivity and their business visibility. Project progress updates, expense reports and timesheet data is now entered once by consultants, with information available instantly to all team members.

Consultants no longer need to key project data into multiple systems and then manually share documents. The solution now tracks all project documents, sharing documents and tracking revisions automatically. Reporting capabilities and executive dashboards built into the solution provide KRC with continuous visibility of project profitability and consultant utilisation.

Franklin explains: “We have already enormously improved the productivity of our consultants, slashing the time needed for project tracking and timesheet management to about 10 minutes per day.

This is enough to free up several hours of additional billable time each week for every consultant.

Dataweave Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/K899

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Laptop’s rugged charm wins over Barwon Water Victoria’s largest regional urban water corporation, Barwon Region Water Corporation, has deployed 45 rugged laptops across its maintenance vehicles.

The company used the services of Advanced Mobile I.T (AMIT) to help roll out the devices.

The laptops are mounted in the vehicles to receive job information and GIS mapping information in real time out in the field. The company also installed ADR-compliant mounting solutions on its fleet of light trucks and utility vehicles.

Barwon Water had previously equipped employees with slate tablet devices which had reached the end of their serviceable life and was looking to invest in a more reliable, rugged, mobile computing solution for its highly mobile workforce.

According to Brad Richards, Barwon Water Manager - Field Services, the company selected the Panasonic Toughbook CF19Mk3 rugged laptop to assist employees in their highly mobile and challenging environment.

“Our maintenance employees are field based and need a reliable and feature-packed unit that can handle a few knocks and bumps that are inevitable when you’re in that environment,” says Richards.

A magnesium alloy frame and shock-absorbent damper help protect the device and its hard drive from damage while in the field. The screen rotates 180° and converts to tablet form for convenience on the go.

“As all of our work is outdoors, the antireflection touch screen is particularly useful and makes it much easier to get things done; and, of course, the ruggedness of the unit is a key consideration for us. The embedded 3G WWAN and GPS functionality also help to make working in the field much more efficient for our employees,” Richards adds.

Panasonic Australia

wf.net.au/K898

AAPT saves trees, $750,000 with document management Following a review of its document management processes, Australian telco AAPT has achieved significant reductions in consumption of power, paper and toner. The company predicts this will lead to a saving of $750,000 within four years.

In the first six months of implementation, the company reduced paper consumption by 22%. This equates to an environmental saving of 2.65 tonnes of CO2.

The improvements have been realised since a staged implementation of a suite of software solutions and a consolidation of the company’s print fleet by Ricoh.

“When we started the rollout, our target was to reduce operating costs - power, toner and paper - by 10% in the first year. We achieved that almost immediately,” says Jodie Black, AAPT Project Manager, Property and Facilities.

According to Black, the reduction in print size, along with a continued focus on change management within the company, is allowing AAPT to save almost 50% of costs on document printing, copying and management.

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The solution has reduced AAPT’s printer and multifunction device (MFD) fleet by 50%. The company has also implemented Equitrac Office for fleet management and security, GlobalScan to streamline document scanning and routing, and @Remote for fleet remote access and reporting.

Equitrac Office’s Follow-You Printing automatically redirects all print jobs to a secure server until they are released when authenticated by a user at any of AAPT’s MFDs. Unprinted jobs are automatically deleted from the system after 24 hours, saving on waste while increasing document security.

“In only six months there were more than 160,000 pages either not printed because users were able to take advantage of the ability to delete print jobs or were automatically purged from the system,” says Black.

The @Remote Green Reports provide AAPT with information on MFD activity and print volumes. This can help the company reduce operating costs by supporting change management.

Ricoh Office Automation

wf.net.au/L565

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Centacare Ballarat halves reporting times with NAV

Centacare Ballarat has halved the time required to compile month-end reports since national ERP specialist Evolution Business Systems deployed the Microsoft Dynamics NAV accounting solution.

The Victorian-based Catholic social service organisation, which has more than 220 employees, 13 offices and a $16 million annual budget, recognised in early 2010 that its existing accounting software was no longer meeting its need to manage as many as 60 different cost centres.

Funded by both federal and state governments, Centacare Ballarat services include homeless support, advocacy for aged housing, mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, marriage counselling programs and employment services. Each program has rigorous reporting requirements.

Centacare Ballarat selected Evolution Business Systems (EBS) as its preferred provider based on recommendations and EBS’s professional reputation. Although the original project plan outlined a three-month deployment time, EBS delivered the fully integrated NAV software in just two months.

Centacare Ballarat Finance Manager Antony Rucco said that rapid deployment was a major benefit to the organisation. “EBS has been great to work with and delivered the NAV project on budget and one month earlier than first planned,” he said. “By cutting the original implementation time by one third, this significantly reduced the disruption of the changeover and gave us access to a better system quicker.”

Microsoft Dynamics NAV replaced the MYOB accounting program which Centacare Ballarat had used for more than a decade.

Primary drivers for the new system were the need for improved reporting, better network performance and a chart of accounts better aligned with its operational structure.

Rucco said major benefits of Microsoft Dynamics NAV were its stability, its flexibility and its ability to streamline business processes.

“For a start, it is very robust,” he said.

“Previously, we had problems with MYOB sessions disappearing, which could happen a couple of times a week, forcing everyone to log out. Now, we simply don’t have this application instability occurring, which has saved us a lot of downtime. “The data and reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV are very logical and intuitive for finance people and the system has a great search function. It is very easy to export Microsoft Dynamics NAV data to Excel or PDF and it’s simple to manipulate the data. We can also easily import and export budgets directly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which has

saved us many hours of manual manipulation and configuration of data. A nice feature is we can do sensitivity analyses - creating ‘what if’ scenarios.

“Our accounts people are settled in with the new software and find that it’s better to use than the previous application. The system is bedded down now, but we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with it.”

Rucco said Microsoft Dynamics NAV also streamlined business processes. “Our monthend reporting, which used to take 10-12 days to finalise, is now completed in half this time,” he said. “This improvement allows us to distribute reports electronically to our finance committee before their meeting, which gives them time to consider the reports and formulate advice to the board.

“By streamlining processes and saving time keying in data, Microsoft Dynamics NAV has given Finance more time to focus on value-added activities for other people in the organisation rather than just count the beans.”

Rucco said he would feel comfortable recommending Evolution Business Systems to other not-for-profit organisations. “They have good industry experience and have developed a good understanding of the needs and challenges of not-for-profit organisations,” he said.

Evolution Business Systems Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/J321

Swifter cloud deployment with business automation Web hosting service provider Usonyx has adopted a business automation system, allowing it to increase productivity by 20% and reduce customer support calls by 20%.

A 14-year veteran in the web hosting business with operations in Australia and throughout Asia, the company wanted to differentiate itself in an extremely competitive marketplace by providing a better customer service experience.

The people at Usonyx believed an automation solution would help achieve this goal and went about selecting a solution with three criteria in mind: a user-friendly interface, 24/7 local support and price.

The company ultimately deployed Parallels Business Automation Standard (PBAS), a hosting business automation solution that

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automates the online storefront, provisioning and billing services to Usonyx end users.

The solution enhanced the delivery of Usonyx’s hosting service, resulting in quicker turnaround times, fewer human errors and effective and efficient online store systems.

Martin Chan, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, says: “We were impressed by how easily we could launch new cloud services with PBAS. Its interface was very intuitive and user friendly, and we knew we had found what we were looking for.”

With the solution in place, Usonyx observed a 20% increase in productivity. This saving allowed the company to put resources to better use.

“What we saved on productivity, time and money also enabled us to channel our resources into developing innovative solutions, from enhancing our customer service to minimising downtime,” Chan says.

Simms International Pty Ltd wf.net.au/J940

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Global network transforms real estate company Colliers International, a worldwide leader in commercial real estate services, will implement a global telecommunications and network infrastructure system from AT&T to help the company complete its multi-year transformation from a network of independent real estate firms into a unified global service company. This will enable Colliers to provide a new level of content, services and applications to its partners and affiliates.

“AT&T had the breadth and depth of service, the expertise and the commitment to deliver the global solution,” said Veresh Sita, Chief Information Officer of Colliers International. “AT&T’s alignment to our enterprising approach to business was paramount throughout the process.” In the midst of an image and brand transformation, Colliers sought optimisation of resources and global alliances, such as AT&T, to eliminate complexities, drive efficiencies and support Colliers globally. Utilising its unique operating model, deep market expertise and service quality, Colliers required a single telecommunications and network services provider that would allow the company to provide simple, flexible and scalable services to their business units around the world. By eliminating multiple disparate carriers, a single source provider creates a consistent service platform and facilitates

increased network performance and end-user experience. Additionally, redundancies are removed from the IT organisation and infrastructure, and costs are lowered by leveraging economies of scale.

Specifically, AT&T Consulting provided guidance on the tactical aspects of the Colliers transformation with project management and data centre expertise.

AT&T Hosting services is allowing Colliers to streamline operations globally, and advanced hosting and cloud services will support significant growth anticipated as a result of their transformation.

As a single source provider of project-based IT work on a global scale, AT&T’s Network Integration group managed migration of services and migration of the customer-owned infrastructure.

Under the terms of the 4-year agreement, AT&T is providing voice, data, consulting and hosting services to seamlessly link 129 Colliers offices located in 13 countries throughout Australia, North America, South America, Europe and Asia. A global intelligent IP backbone with additional security services with centralised reporting and administrative functions provided the necessary backbone to assist Colliers International.

AT&T Australia

wf.net.au/J356

ERP prises open Clear Solar’s financials

Clear Solar, one of Australia’s largest solar power installation companies, has implemented a business-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, giving staff a better view of the company’s financials and inventory.

Clear Solar employs approximately 130 staff nationally. Based in Victoria, the organisation has offices in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and the ACT. The deployment of the ERP system followed a realisation at Clear Solar that the way the company handled its financials was not ideal.

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“After several years of rapid growth, we realised that our business processes needed an overhaul,” says Paul Wilson, Managing Director for Clear Solar.

“Many of the systems that we had in place for tracking our financials were very labour intensive. This made it difficult for us to forecast and plan our inventory requirements, and delayed the production of our management reports. We were dealing lots of small inefficiencies, which added up to serious growing pains for our business,” Wilson says.

After successfully implementing an Oracle CRM OnDemand solution in 2009, Clear Solar decided to migrate to a whole-of-business ERP solution, with integrated financial management. After looking at solutions from six major software vendors, the company chose IT consultancy Dataweave to design, integrate and provide ongoing remotely managed support services for an Oracle E-Business Suite solution.

The system helps manage quotes, inventory planning and general finances at Clear Solar.

The integration between Oracle’s CRM OnDemand solution and its E-Business Suite has allowed Clear Solar to gain a better view of its customer interactions. Customer service operators in the contact centre are now able to generate quotes 25% faster than previously, view the status of inventory items related to client orders and accurately estimate installation dates.

Dataweave Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/K287

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Students free to roam with wireless consolidation

New Zealand preparatory school Hereworth has upgraded its wireless network to improve its performance and manageability.

Hereworth School is a private preparatory school for boys, specialising in primary and intermediate education for both day boys and boarders.

The school has a mixed computing environment supporting both PCs and Apple Macintosh systems with a combination of wired and wireless networking technologies. This diversity extends to the school’s networking environment with network switches and wireless access points from a variety of different suppliers.

Students use a combination of computers installed in classrooms with wired network connections supplemented by a number of wirelessly connected Apple Macintosh notebooks. Over time, more students have been bringing their own laptops to school, which also requires wireless connectivity.

As demand for wireless connectivity grew, Hereworth’s existing wireless LAN solutions became insufficient. Managing wireless connectivity became difficult and much more administration time was required.

Furthermore, providing seamless wireless network access was problematic and the various wireless LAN solutions suffered performance issues due to the high saturation of neighbouring wireless networks. This was causing connectivity issues for both staff and students, particularly when they moved from room to room.

“We had a mixture of wireless capabilities, based on different varieties of solutions, and as a result we had connectivity issues trying to roam

across the different wireless access points,” said Sean Feltoe, IT Manager for Hereworth School. “Each of the access points was managed separately and manually and that ultimately was what we needed to improve.”

To address these problems, the school employed a D-Link DWS-3024L Gigabit Managed Unified Wired/Wireless Switch. Accompanying DWL8600AP Unified Wireless 802.11n Dual-Band Access Points increase wireless throughput and capacity.

Hereworth’s existing switches are now connected to the new switch, effectively unifying the entire network around a centralised management point and providing additional capacity to expand the network in the future.

The solution reduces time for managing and administering Hereworth School’s network. IT staff can now easily and centrally add new devices to the network as students frequently bring new laptops into school.

The central management capabilities of the new solution also improve the level of security. Instead of monitoring the security level of each access point, the switch automatically enforces security settings to prevent unsecure wireless networks.

Students and teachers benefit from improved wireless performance and the ability to move throughout the school without experiencing wireless signal dropouts.

Additionally, the new access points suffer less interference than the previous solution, as the majority of the equipment within the school supports the 5 GHz frequency, a part of the spectrum that other wireless networks in the school’s area have yet to clog up.

“Our mobile users can now get seamless roaming between access points for clear, uninterrupted data and voice communication throughout the entire network infrastructure,” said Feltoe. “The coverage and performance of the wireless network has also been significantly increased. At the same time, the deployment was extremely quick and simple so there was very little downtime or interruption to the school.”

D-Link Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/L165

Yarra Valley Water to save on print costs Yarra Valley Water has appointed Canon Australia to consolidate and streamline the company’s print environment. The contract is expected to save Yarra Valley Water approximately $100,000 in print costs in the first year alone.

Commenting on the contract, Yarra Valley Water Managing Director Tony Kelly said: “The aim of our sustainable print strategy is to significantly reduce our environmental footprint, and forms part of our wider Green Office strategy.

“The strategy was developed so that we can run our operations in a sustainable way, and has been openly embraced by all levels of staff and is now a part of the culture at Yarra Valley Water.

“Canon has helped other organisations improve productivity, reduce costs and minimise environmental impact through their print environment and we look forward to seeing the same results.

“We hope to be able show other businesses that improving environmental performance is realistic and achievable,” said Kelly.”

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The work has already commenced, with Canon already reducing Yarra Valley Water’s 83 printers and scanners down to 16 multifunction devices. Yarra Valley Water will also introduce Canon’s uniFlow software, enabling secure printing and statistics and accounting, which will give Yarra Valley Water an accurate view of its printing costs.

During the month of October, Yarra Valley Water saved over $2400 through the deletion of jobs that were not collected from printers. That’s a saving of 74 reams of paper (or 14.8 boxes). During the same period, users selected to print their jobs double sided 74.25% of the time. This has saved 84,571 sheets of paper or the equivalent of 169.14 reams of paper.

Yarra Valley water is the largest of Melbourne’s three retail metropolitan water utilities, delivering services to more than 1.6 million people and 50,000 plus businesses in the northern and eastern suburbs.

Canon Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/H652

www.VoiceandData.com.au

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Acorn mobilises database’s roots Drivers at vehicle specialist Acorn Rentals can now access the company’s internal database from their iPads. This has helped improve administration efficiency and increase the mobility of the team.

Acorn is an accident replacement vehicle specialist, providing ‘not at fault’ drivers with rental cars while their own ones get repaired.

Based in Sydney, Acorn provides this service to over 250 locations across the nation and has been in operation for 20 years.

The company has used a custom-built FileMaker Pro database to manage its entire rental booking system for the last 16 years. The company had a desire to increase the efficiency and mobility of its team, so it looked for ways to provide the information in that database to its drivers, while they’re on the road.

Acorn ultimately invested in FileMaker Go for iPad. The company was able to create a custom customer-service solution for iPad over the course of several days, after struggling for months to develop a proprietary mobile solution.

www.VoiceandData.com.au

The solution is now used by all of the company’s six delivery drivers, allowing them to access the database and update the rental booking system while on the road. Using their iPads, drivers enter customer and vehicle details directly into the firm’s main database at headquarters. This eases the administrative burden that drivers previously were subjected to.

“Our drivers immediately had full access to our FileMaker Pro database from anywhere. We subsequently made a few layout modifications and created a script so that we could insert customer signatures electronically into all the documents. It was that simple,” says Michael Costin, National Account Manager at Acorn.

“We now deliver a customer experience that is unrivalled by any car hire firm in Australia and was achieved without a huge development budget and specialised hardware,” says Aaron Martin, National Operations Manager at Acorn.

Customers now get their replacement cars faster and easier, and receive documentation through email. Plus, by taking advantage of the iPads’ GPS, head office can monitor how far the drivers are away from a customer.

FileMaker Inc

wf.net.au/L587

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IP TELEPHONY SENDS GOMED BOSS ON HOLIDAY

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oldfields Occupational Medicine (GOMED), an independent occupational medical facility, has let go of its legacy technology and telephony provider after the facility experienced three months of IT downtime in two years. A new telephony solution has given GOMED’s boss, Tim Spokes, the peace of mind to set out on an overseas holiday.

GOMED is located in the heart of the Goldfields, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The seven clinical staff at GOMED have vast experience in both mining and heavy industry, and the organisation offers a broad range of health services to support the specific needs of heavy industry, men’s health and primary care to mines in surrounding areas, including mine health surveillance, advanced digital aided diagnostics, drug and alcohol testing and pre-employment medicals that can be quite extensive.

The organisation is heavily reliant on IT for a variety of purposes including electronic health records; communication of pathology results and digital X-ray and image results; and, like most medical practices, relies heavily on IT to treat patients in a timely manner and to successfully manage the backend of the business.

GOMED had been having ongoing issues with a legacy technology provider that had seen the IT system suffer over three months of downtime in two years.

This downtime meant loss of patient contact, leading to a decrease in income through not being able to take calls to book in appointments, and had also

“We have seen a 35% increase in income, a 50% decrease in unanswered calls and zero downtime.”

resulted in the loss of the vital 24-hour emergency contact service.

Spokes says: “There was an impact not only on the practice income, but [also] in staying in touch with our patients and keeping up to date with medical data and downloads. Reliable systems are key when it comes to e-health and none more so than telephony - our business is still highly reliant on the telephone for bookings and remote patient care.”

On 22 December 2010, GOMED’s entire IT and telephony systems were suddenly turned off without warning and the business was almost paralysed without a telephone or internet connection.

To ensure reliable IT and communications and to avoid a repeat of the sudden downtime under the previous system, NEC dealer KalTelCo Services and Telstra worked together to install new IT and telecommunications systems.

They were able to have new IT and telephony systems based around NEC’s SV8100 communications server working with Telstra ISDN2 services, together with a Telstra Internet Direct Service, up and running between Christmas and New Year, with only two days of downtime for the business.

Practically, for GOMED, this means full visibility of all extensions within the office, flexible programming options for employees, the ability to reroute incoming callers to prevent ‘lost calls’ from patients, a large number of speed dial locations available, and one-touch buttons to access these and other functions.

GOMED is currently making use of a number of the unified communications features of the solution including voicemail, email and IP telephony.

Spokes says that the business has seen some great improvements since the installation.

“We have seen a 35% increase in income, a 50% decrease in unanswered calls and zero downtime,” Spokes says.

“After-hours calls management has improved by 100%, and we have since employed three new staff and one new receptionist because the patients can get in contact with us and the message system lets them know we will return the call,” he says.

“I now have peace of mind and am going on my first overseas holiday in two years! I know that with a one-button push, my medical staff and I can be in contact,” Spokes says.

NEC Business Solutions wf.net.au/L160

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Recruitment and training provider cuts call costs by 40%

Recruitment, education and training provider Angus Knight deployed IP telephony to cut call costs, ease administration and more quickly roll out voice connectivity to new sites.

The company was struggling with the high cost and management of more than two dozen separate PABX phone systems across its 55 locations across Australia. Angus Knight engaged Avaya partner IP Voice Solutions to deploy Avaya IP Office IP500 and Avaya IP Office

IP406 VoIP systems, designed for small and medium businesses.

Angus Knight also deployed Avaya Compact Contact Centre, an application that provides IT helpdesk staff with live and historical call statistics.

The company also rolled out Avaya Voice Mail Pro, software that provides automated voice recording and email integration, and Avaya Phone Manager, a desktop application that indicates the status of any handset on the network. There are more than 800 Avaya 5600 Series IP telephones at the company's many sites.

Angus Knight is also deploying Avaya VPN phones, which include software that enables staff to plug their phone into any internet port at a remote location. This provides them with voice connectivity and access to their contact lists, calls and messages.

The Avaya IP Office system allows Angus Knight staff to make free internal telephone calls to any staff member with a four-digit extension across the company’s 55 full-time and 30 part-time locations. This has reduced overall call costs by about 40%. The Avaya IP Office conferencing facility has also enabled Angus Knight to reduce teleconferencing costs by 93%.

Staff also use the Avaya one-X Mobility application to extend desk phone functionality to their mobile phones. Staff can make and receive internal and external calls, check voicemail and conduct conferences from their mobile phones when they are on the road, just as they would if they were in the office.

Avaya Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/J033

Cellarmasters deploys new contact centre with IP telephony Cellarmasters, Australia’s largest direct wine retailer, will deploy the Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite Customer Interaction Center (CIC) at its new contact centre in Surry Hills in inner Sydney.

Interactive Intelligence Elite partner CallTime Solutions is deploying the CIC next-generation telephony platform, which will support growing sales and enhance service to more than 360,000 Cellarmasters customers.

The SIP-based CIC solution will provide Cellarmasters’ new Surry Hills 200-seat contact centre and the organisation’s 100 business users with functionality for IP PBX, automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, unified messaging, desktop faxing, softphone, presence management, multi-channel recording and blended dialling. It replaces the organisation’s legacy PBX, ACD, call recording and dialler systems.

“We selected Interactive Intelligence on account of CIC’s excellent Windows user interface, its high level of compliance with our documented requirements and the fact that it only uses a small number of servers.

We looked at six solutions in total but Interactive Intelligence was very attractive in terms of its simplicity, ease of use and its small IT footprint,” says Cameron Brawn, Head of IT at Cellarmasters Group.

Initially, CIC will provide support for email customer response, inbound calls and outbound sales to existing customers. The organisation will be able to monitor call time queues, effectively manage emails from point of contact into an in-house developed CRM platform and provide priority routing for loyalty program customers. Efficient call routing will also enable customers to speak to their personal wine advisor.

www.VoiceandData.com.au

“The fact that with CIC our PABX can be hosted off site means that we don’t need to have a dedicated computer room in our new contact centre.

All features that we require are integrated within the Interactive Intelligence software and it also provides for disaster recovery. As CIC’s technology footprint is so small the system is easy to duplicate,” says Brawn.

Interactive Intelligence’s ‘thin’ client strategy will enable the organisation to more quickly and easily deploy its software for new distributed users by reducing bandwidth requirements and eliminating the need to install software at each desktop.

Interactive Intelligence Australia

wf.net.au/J043

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MEAT PROCESSOR FORGOES ‘TAJ MAHAL’ OF UNIFIED COMMS

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&R Pastoral, one of Australia’s leading meat processors, has opted not to install a large, all-in-one unified communications (UC) system, but instead implement what it calls a “small” system, with the option of adding more later on.

The family-owned company has dealings in meat procurement, processing and export, and has been in the meat processing industry for over 30 years.

It supplies its products throughout Australia and to 80 countries around the world.

The company has grown substantially in its time, now with seven sites in Australia, as well as one in the US and one in China. In the last year alone, the company has acquired an Australian processor of lamb, mutton and goat, and 50% of an American meat importer.

Until recently, T&R had been using a traditional PABX. The company’s ICT Manager, Matt Kruschel, says that with the business expanding, the company needed to explore ways of modernising its communications systems to optimise its productivity and efficiency.

The company consequently looked at implementing a UC solution at its South Australian Murray Bridge plant - its biggest plant and also its head office, with more than 1000 employees.

“In our business we live and die by the telephone.

The production environment is very harsh, so we needed to have robust telephony solution that combined digital, IP and analogue capabilities,” Kruschel says.

“We also wanted to ensure the solution was scalable and futureproof so we could expand and roll out the phone system to our other sites,” he says.

"In our business we live and die by the telephone.

The production environment is very harsh, so we needed to have robust telephony solution that combined digital, IP and analog capabilities."

When the opportunity for a new telephony system arose, the company turned to Telbiz, a telecommunications outfit with which T&R had an existing relationship.

T&R looked at several solutions but eventually settled on NEC’s Univerge SV8100 IP Communications Server. The system provides a combination of IP, digital and analog circuit-switched technology including 40 IP, 40 digital and 45 analog services at T&R’s Murray Bridge site.

All employees at the site now have voicemail and the executive team has unified messaging. Executive team members also have IP handsets set up in their homes, which enable them to call connect into a router by VPN back into T&R’s telephony system.

Telbiz has also integrated the phone system into T&R’s existing rugged two-way radio system, which has given the business extra functionality over its existing infrastructure. “[The system] has allowed us to move into the unified communications arena gently. We didn’t need the ‘Taj Mahal’ package that many vendors were offering. The NEC solution has allowed T&R Pastoral to start small and add on features when we need to,” Kruschel says.

He says the solution has improved the company’s efficiency and customer service.

“The voicemail and unified messaging features have reduced the number of missed calls we receive; we are much more on the ball than before. It means we can work faster and respond to people quicker,” Kruschel says.

“The IP-enabled solution has also provided our company with more flexibility. Many of our senior people live in Adelaide and often need to do business in the city. They now have the ability to make calls off our network through SIP trunking, rather than using their own private lines, which in the past has been a costly overhead for the company,” he says.

Telbiz sold the solution as part of a Telstra Business System bundle, which has allowed T&R to reduce its line rental and maintenance and call costs.

“We have more autonomy,” Kruschel says, “as we are able to customise the programming on site; and the internal auditing system allows us to better manage the company’s calling expenditure.”

The Murray Bridge site has proved to be a success and T&R has decided to link the server to three of its other sites, located in South Australia and Queensland.

NEC Business Solutions wf.net.au/K189

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www.VoiceandData.com.au

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University of Western Sydney goes live with unified communications system A converged voice and data network costing $1.2 million from NEC is set to deliver productivity gains for the University of Western Sydney (UWS).

The university-wide unified communications system was launched early in February . The project will reduce the ongoing operational cost of running a telephony network as well as provide greater flexibility and portability to university staff and improved services to students.

The new network features a fully converged IP telephony infrastructure incorporating unified communications functionality such as presence and unified messaging.

Paul Hardaker, IT Infrastructure Services Manager at the University of Western Sydney, said: “Upgrading the communications network provides us with the opportunity to consolidate the communications infrastructure across all of our campuses, reduce our operational costs and better support our staff and students. This new system is able to support the growth and changing needs of the university.”

The new network consists of two NEC SV8500 VoIP servers with distributed architecture across the university’s six campuses, and is able to support up to 4000 users. NEC Australia worked with the University of Western Sydney to integrate existing handsets with the new data and voice infrastructure.

www.VoiceandData.com.au

University staff often work on a number of campuses and the unified communications system enables staff to be productive regardless of their location. Unified communications features such as follow-me numbers, unified messaging and presence bring greater value and flexibility to employees. Staff will soon be able to log into a phone from anywhere on

any campus and use their number and address book, allowing them to work productively from any location. Presence information will provide visibility into colleague availability and preferred contact methods, saving time and streamlining communications, while unified messaging merges voicemail with email to deliver greater efficiencies.

Current and prospective students now have greater access to staff and student centre support, with the network enabling call centre queues to be run across multiple campuses and student enquiries to be more quickly answered.

“We worked closely with UWS to deliver a centrally managed telephony platform that would be easy to manage and future-proof. In addition to supporting the current needs of the university, the network is also capable of supporting video, providing UWS with the freedom to expand into richer communications in the future,” said Bob Lanigan, General Manager National Sales & Customer Support, NEC Australia.

The system is currently active across the University of Western Sydney campuses in Parramatta, Campbelltown, Bankstown, Blacktown, Penrith, Hawkesbury and Penrith.

NEC Business Solutions

wf.net.au/H871

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Rural health alliance turns to videoconferencing The Grampians Rural Health Alliance (GRHA), situated in Western Victoria, comprises 12 hospital-based health services, four bush nursing centres and several stand-alone community health centres. It supports improved regional health outcomes by providing technology, applications and communications solutions to connect the region’s health services.

GRHA wanted to implement a videoconferencing network in order to deliver more effective patient treatment and better peer

support for clinicians by sharing expertise and resources across a broadband videoconference network. This in turn links more than 40 health facilities in Western Victoria.

With limited numbers of specialised healthcare resources and the large rural area of the Grampians to support, the region’s health services needed to maximise its resources in order to provide more effective patient treatment.

To support GRHA’s requirements for a specialised healthcare videoconferencing network, GRHA turned to Melbourneheadquartered iVision.

T h e s y s t e m s i n t e g ra t o r ove rs a w the design and development of the highly customised, integrated and mobile MediLink videoconferencing units. Based on Tandberg technology, the solution includes 17 of the customised videoconferencing units that include integrated digital cameras. In addition, 100 videoconferencing units were deployed across GRHA. Ultimately, the systems will enable health services to provide patients with immediate care - using specialists typically not available in remote areas.

More than 1200 hours of videoconferencing

are being notched up on the network each quarter and this figure is growing exponentially.

Videoconferencing demand was also strong among the region’s psychiatric services, which are increasingly relying on videoconferencing for staff meetings, training, exam preparation and student supervision.

More than 1800 staff members have used the network to participate in e-learning courses.

Moreover, the service is increasingly being used to conduct patient care conferences and to bring together agencies and families when planning patient discharges. This is reducing travel demands on staff and enabling more effective coordinated support for patients and their families. “ W h e n a s ke d a b o u t t h e i r u s e o f videoconferencing, our managers said that they use the videoconferencing network just like the telephone. It saves significant amounts of time in travelling and improves the communication between the sites,” says David Ryan, Executive Officer of GRHA. iVision Pty Ltd wf.net.au/J715

IP phone unified communications benefits foreshore authority The waterfront from Darling Harbour to The Rocks, one of Australia’s iconic tourist centres, is managed by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA). Voice communications, both internally among the Authority’s four locations, and externally with business contacts and tourists all over the world, is critical to the SHFA’s operations.

Running its telephony service from a TDM PBX was once the only option for the group, but as internet protocol (IP) and SIP began to emerge, IT executives found it impossible to ‘back in’ IP functionality to an outdated PBX, so they turned to an all-IP environment and the Microsoft office communications server (OCS) 2007 R2. The reason: an OCS platform would give the organisation an advanced IP telephony feature set, including unified messaging, conferencing standard call features, in a well-known Microsoft environment.

Like many organisations, the SHFA had a diverse cross-section of end users to answer to but the common thread was that people wanted to keep the tradition of a desktop phone while also being able to enjoy productivity-enhancing benefits of Microsoft OCS. SHFA IT Manager Matt Marlor examined several different kinds of phones, looking at functionality, usability and price. Specifically, because he wanted to maintain an IP PBX as a backup system, he needed phones

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that could run on both systems simultaneously.

In the end, the snom 370 from Alloy made the cut.

“The snom phones really blew us away immediately,” said Marlor. “And the key was that they could run perfectly on Microsoft OCS, but if anything went wrong, they were also capable of running the fallback system (the NET VX1200 Voice Exchange for Unified Communications).”

While the snom phones at SHFA were immediately operational on OCS, Marlor also wanted a custom management system which would control elements such as provisioning, firmware upgrades and phone certification, and which would be user friendly not only for the IT team, but for the end users as well. Marlor used the information on the snom wiki and was able to build a management system, the adoption of which, between development, testing and full roll out, took about six months.

In the end, the SHFA deployed more than 300 snom endpoints, including snom 320s, snom 370s and the snom PA1 SIP public address system across its OCS environment. Some of the immediate benefits included: easy provisioning of new lines, from central site or across branch locations and interoperable fail over from OCS to other environments.

Alloy Computer Products Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/G926

www.VoiceandData.com.au

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Specsavers all eyes and ears for tidy telephonic saving

Optical retailer Specsavers opened its first Australian store in February 2008. It now has more than 220 stores throughout the country, and an annual turnover approaching $300 million.

Initially, the company’s growth came from ‘conversion’ stores - outlets already operating as independent, local community optometrists all over the country who chose to join Specsavers under a franchise agreement.

More recently, growth has come from the opening of ‘organic’ stores totally new retail operations established by Specsavers.

In the conversion stores, existing phone systems were simply reinstalled after the fit-out to rebrand the stores and re-open them under the Specsavers umbrella. The new organic stores, however, presented an opportunity to install a phone system of the company’s own choosing.

Specsavers selected a Panasonic phone system for installation in all new organic stores by Civic Communications, a business partner of IPL Communications.

The phone system was set up to deliver four outgoing lines including two voice lines, one fax line and one line for EFTPOS purchases, and the HICAPS on-the-spot electronic health fund claims and payments system.

The phone system allows for more efficient call management, while offering flexible electronic payment and on-the-spot health fund claim services for customers.

It also allows Specsavers personnel to transfer calls between the front-of-store retail space and the optometrist consulting rooms, a feature lacking in the legacy phone systems used in many of the conversion stores.

The system also provides the flexibility to use up to four outgoing lines at once. When stores are not using fax and EFTPOS, they can make two phone calls and still have two phone lines free.

It finds the next available line automatically and allows EFTPOS and fax to use any available line, meaning electronic payments and claims and customer calls can be managed simultaneously for better customer service.

In some other systems, fax and EFTPOS are locked into a specific line, so if someone is using one line for fax, a customer can’t use EFTPOS until the line becomes available. Or the phone line and EFTPOS may be shared, so if a customer is making an EFTPOS purchase, another customer calling to make an appointment, for example, won’t get through.

“It is much better for customer service to have separate lines,” says Specsavers IT Project Officer Cristina Bodgan.

According to Bodgan, the system integrates well with stores’ other equipment.

“The Panasonic phone systems are compatible with music on hold, answering machines and cordless handsets,” Bodgan says.

Bodgan says the new system is a step up from the previous system, in several ways.

“Compared with what we were paying for our old system before, it’s more cost effective. It’s lower cost and the service is so much better. We are aiming to keep the Panasonic phone system as standard across all the stores. We are very happy with it,” she says.

IPL Communications Pty Ltdv

wf.net.au/J928

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Unified comms helps clinic cope with growth With plans to open a second practice near its Melbourne location, Airlie Women’s Clinic replaced its existing phone system with a unified communications (UC) solution, to help improve efficiency and reduce costs.

With about 50,000 patients on file, the clinic provides preventative care, support for family health issues and counselling. Prior to opening the second facility, the clinic employed three receptionists, who together handled up to 800 calls per day using a 10-line traditional telephone service.

With the existing phone system, callers were regularly placed in lengthy queues, and the clinic was also experiencing line dropouts and lost calls after the caller was put on hold. On top of that, there was no effective reporting on the status of the system.

When management decided to open a second facility, the organisation was faced with providing telephony in the new premises. The clinic ultimately decided it wanted one communications system to work across the two facilities to improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

“Front-of-practice efficiency is critical in the delivery of high-quality patient care, and how you engage with people via the telephone is particularly important when a patient’s wellbeing is at stake,” says Robert Szwarcberg, Director of the Airlie Women’s Clinic.

After reviewing several options and working with telephony

consultants Flexnet, the clinic selected a ShoreTel system comprising a Voice Switch, 19 IP265 phones, seven cordless headsets and several licences for ShoreTel UC software. This system offered the lowest TCO of the options the clinic examined.

Once the solution was operational, the workload on reception became so low that the clinic no longer needed three receptionists. As a result, management was able to reassign a receptionist to work directly with doctors to create more time for them to spend on direct patient care.

“Thanks to call management alone, ShoreTel is saving Airlie Women’s Clinic a minimum of 26 work hours per week; 75% of calls are answered within 30 seconds, and 90% of calls are answered within one minute,” Szwarcberg says.

This was a major improvement from the previous system, which placed calls in long queues creating patient service issues and burdening receptionists with many conflicting demands. With the new system, the clinic’s ISDN connection provides 20 incoming lines at a lower monthly cost than that of the previous system, which only offered 10 lines.

Each receptionist now has a two-monitor set-up, and uses a hands-free headset. With call management software on one monitor, receptionists answer incoming calls using the headsets and can view the activity of the entire phone system, including the number of calls being queued and which phones are busy.

The second monitor provides access to doctor schedules, current patient activity, waiting room status and patient details, so that appointments can be made during calls.

ShoreTel Australia

wf.net.au/K190

HD videoconferencing for translating service ONCALL Interpreters and Translators Agency (ONCALL) provides high-quality conference interpreting and translating services worldwide.

ONCALL decided that a new method of delivery was required to provide its customers with qualified interpreters regardless of time or location, and looked to HD videoconferencing to provide auditory and visual communication as an alternative to on-site interpreting.

“We have significant contracts in a diverse range of urban and rural locations. It is impossible to have National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters accredited staff speaking every language, in every location,” says Ari Pappas, Corporate Manager, ONCALL. “We needed a solution which would enable our interpreters to have face-to-face communication with our clients, despite a potential distance of thousands of kilometres separating them,” Pappas adds.

International economic pressures meant that ONCALL also needed to revaluate its spending. Rising travel costs were a major challenge, not just for the ONCALL business, but for its clients too.

ONCALL reviewed a number of HD videocommunications solutions, ultimately settling on a solution from LifeSize. ONCALL implemented the vendor’s Express and Networker products in both its Sydney and Melbourne offices, with the help of Black Box Network Services.

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“Interpreters are now able to engage in more face-to-face interpreting via HD videoconferencing, thus increasing their revenue,” Pappas says.

He added that the simplicity of the system encouraged users across the board to utilise the videoconferencing solution, “from the booking officers who organise assignments for the interpreters, to the clients who simply dial in with little or no instruction from us”.

While the key drivers for a videoconferencing solution were to reduce travel costs and broaden the locations of easily accessible interpreting services, the company gained the added benefit of improved communication with current clients, particularly those with special requirements.

“Not only do we need to provide interpreting services for spoken languages, but also for AUSLAN, which is sign language for the deaf. The deaf community requires services on a regular basis and obviously faceto-face interaction is necessary in order to communicate,” Pappas says.

A return on investment was realised in the first year of using the system.

“In 12 months, the system paid for itself and our travel costs were drastically reduced from the previous year,” said Ari Pappas.

Black Box Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/J705

www.VoiceandData.com.au

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COMMUNICATING WITH CUSTOMERS ON THEIR TERMS, WITH IP TELEPHONY

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T solutions provider CompNow has replaced its traditional phone system with a VoIP platform, allowing the company to integrate its telephony into its data network and providing the company with more sophisticated call management.

CompNow is an Australian-owned business, providing IT solutions for retail, corporate, government, education and pro video. It is the largest Apple reseller in Australia. The company has several sites, from its head office in South Melbourne, warehouse in Malvern, to retail stores in Geelong and Crows Nest, and university outlets at UNSW, RMIT, Monash University and UTS. The company’s customers include consumers, businesses and students, all of which require different methods of communication, at different times.

The company’s existing, traditional phone system was ageing and restrictive, both in functionality and the ability to expand. Any features added to the base system - such as voicemail to email - were considered optional extras, further increasing the cost of telephony.

“CompNow reviewed its existing phone system and decided there had to be a more cost-effective and contemporary system on the market,” says Robert Ruigrok, CFO at CompNow. Qtec Systems provided CompNow with a Digium Switchvox VoIP telephony platform. This included professional services for configuration, ongoing support, and system management and upgrades.

The platform is a pure IP PBX, enabling CompNow to integrate the phone system partially or totally to its

“There had to be a more cost-effective and contemporary system on the market.”

data network. It delivers functionality such as voicemail and tax to email, conference bridging, call recording, call queues, interactive voice response (IVR) functionality and a suite of unified communications features.

The implementation included one AA305 server, located in CompNow’s South Melbourne head office, another AA305 in Crows Nest and an AA65 server in the company’s Malvern warehouse. The Geelong and university sites have handsets that are connected back to the central IP PBX at South Melbourne. There are more than 125 IP handsets operational across CompNow’s warehouse, offices and stores.

CompNow also had a GSM gateway installed enabling calls to be made from the company’s locations to mobile users as mobile calls, reducing expensive fixed to mobile network tariffs.

Given the large volume of calls coming into CompNow’s sales and support divisions, the system was built, configured and tested before implementation began at each site. Phones were migrated after hours, which meant the company experienced little to no downtime and business risks were minimised.

Through VoIP, the system lets CompNow internally route calls between offices based on customer requirement and volume of traffic, helping to reduce telephony costs. All calls between head office, the warehouse and stores are achieved by simply dialling an extension number and travel via the company’s internal network. Converging voice and data onto a single common network also means less equipment and easier integration for IT staff.

The platform is customisable, letting CompNow manage phone calls and integrate with its other business applications such as their customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The system provides more sophisticated call handling, which can be centrally or remotely managed, and can accommodate the requirements of the company’s various customers, such as the ability to redirect calls during school holidays or in busy periods.

Ruigrok says the solution “gives CompNow the ability to intelligently handle our customers’ calls based on their needs. For example, a student at RMIT can easily ring a dedicated number and be directed to a local person, a call centre or IVR for assistance.”

Making moves, adds and changes within the system is now simpler and doesn’t require a technician to be onsite. The system enhances mobility beyond traditional dial-up networks and future-proofs the network by supporting web-enabled applications through the phone system.

Wavelink

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wf.net.au/L566

www.VoiceandData.com.au

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AAPT looks to cloud for contact centre Following the sale of AAPT’s consumer division to iiNet, along with associated contact centre infrastructure, the AAPT business division needed to quickly implement a whole new contact centre solution.

In keeping with the organisation’s shift to cloud-based applications, AAPT selected IPscape - a cloud contact centre offering - to manage contact centre operations and integrate with Salesforce CRM. According to AAPT Chief Operating Officer David Yuile, this represents a broader inclination towards the cloud.

“The days of complex, expensive legacy IT systems are numbered.

Innovative, secure cloud solutions from companies like Google and IPscape allow us to be more agile and responsive at lower cost,” he says.

The new system went live on 16 March following a two-month implementation process. The deal follows comprehensive due diligence

by AAPT covering security, functionality, reporting and financial strength.

AAPT has up to 225 agents accessing the contact centre technology in the cloud from various locations across Australia.

In the short time since going live with the new solution, AAPT has enjoyed significant benefits and positive feedback from the contact centre team - in particular, the level of control they now have over the technology.

With the previous on-premise system, nothing could be changed without involvement of IT and typically a three-day turnaround with added strain on the IT team for simple administrative tasks.

With the new system, control is given to the contact centre team themselves allowing them to react quickly to increased call volumes.

Contact centre staff can manipulate call queues, create new agents and update the automated message on the IVR, all in real time, providing far better levels of customer service.

Yuile says: “We’ve started to view the technology as an enabler for our business. We can change the way we operate and improve business processes thanks to the flexibility and functionality of the IPscape system.

“Now we can change the way we operate based on what’s happening in the market to better serve our customers.”

Yuile also says the solution surpassed those of other vendors in terms of agility and value.

“There’s no additional cost for features such as real-time reporting, new communication channels, changing customer campaigns on the fly or integration to Salesforce CRM,” Yuile says.

IPscape

wf.net.au/J942

Pharmacy keeps watchful IP eye on retail outlets

As part of a major security system expansion, Chemist Warehouse has deployed IP network cameras to monitor its expanding Australian retail network, in order to comply with the strict regulatory requirements of the Australian pharmaceutical industry.

“As our retail network is constantly expanding we needed a scalable, robust and reliable surveillance system,” says Ryan Calvert, IT Operations Manager for Chemist Warehouse.

The company decided against an analog solution, instead opting for an open platform, IP-based solution.

“It provides the back end to support evolving software applications and network integration. There is no way an analog solution could provision for our future surveillance needs - if we ever wanted to upgrade the network or deploy a new software application, we would literally have to rip it out and start again,” Calvert says.

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The company deployed 1500 cameras from Axis Communications across its 170 stores. An additional 1000 cameras are expected to be installed at Chemist Warehouse’s 40 new stores by the end of 2011.

The devices used included the M3014, P3344-VE, P1344 and P1346. The system relies on Milestone’s XProtect Enterprise open platform IP network video software, which monitors the surveillance system remotely. It allows Chemist Warehouse to manage, control, view, search and export the live or recorded image feed from its network cameras.

One key requirement for the solution was reliability.

Calvert explains: “As with all Australian pharmacies, we stock a large variety of sought-after prescription and over-the-counter medications.

This means we have to adhere to a number of industry regulations, one of which is maintaining a reliable security network, so we cannot afford to have even one camera down.”

The new solution proved adequate in this requirement.

“Our blind testing revealed that Axis’s cameras have a less than 1% failure rate, compared to cameras from other vendors which generally had a failure rate of between 4 and 5%,” Calvert says.

Chemist Warehouse was also happy with the post-sale support provided.

“We found that with most other vendors, as soon as the sale transaction was complete we never heard from them again. This was not the case with Axis, we have developed a long-lasting relationship with the local sales team, who regularly check in to learn about our new business plans and evolving surveillance needs to ensure we always have the optimum solution in place,” Calvert says.

Axis Communications Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/L564

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CONVERGENCE

Demons call upon the power of unified comms

The Melbourne Football Club (MFC) - also known as ‘The Demons’ - has ditched its 10-year-old POTS phone system in favour of a unified communications (UC) system that provides the club with free interoffice calls and greater mobility.

The AFL club boasts 35,000 diehard members and is supported by 150 employees

working from a CBD office and sites at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and AAMI Park.

MFC’s existing phone system was 10 years old and was hampering the club’s internal communications. The system lacked the reliability and features needed to connect employees working between its three operations sites.

Maintenance needs were increasing and the high costs of moves, add-ons and changes meant basic service was often postponed or simply not made. As a result, employees relied on their mobile devices to communicate with colleagues and others. The shortcomings of the system were also impacting on the club’s service delivery to members.

According to Richard Arnott, IT Manager at the MFC, the Demons needed a communications system that could provide more versatility.

“Retaining the [existing] system was simply non-viable. Users were unable to communicate within the same workspace or when in the field, which is critical to all organisations, not just a professional footy club.

To add to the woes, the system kept crashing and lacked the basic reliability a phone system should possess,” he said.

The main requirements for a replacement telephone system included reliability and the scale to expand across three sites and include

employees working off-site. The club looked at various systems before deciding on a ShoreTel solution comprising IP phone handsets, switches and applications.

Arnott says the solution provides “the flexibility and resourcefulness so that our three sites could behave like one. We no longer feel like we are working from three silos.”

The solution was deployed within two weeks.

Arnott says the solution has helped contribute to “the Melbourne footy club with a strong communication backbone that enables IT and other staff to concentrate on other commitments”.

With the solution, the club can expand the features of a deskphone to mobile devices, helping employees keep in touch whether they are working inside or outside the traditional office.

Employees can now connect to other employees working within the office or offsite with simple click-through. Football club members’ calls are being addressed efficiently without undue delay. Administrators can keep track of conversations and voicemails for future reference and quality control.

ShoreTel Australia wf.net.au/K897

Radio network tunes in to unified comms Commercial radio network ARN (Australian Radio Network) has completed a companywide telephony and networking rollout.

ARN owns and operates eleven capital city stations for 25 – 54-year-olds, including Mix, The Edge and Classic Hits formats, among others.

The company previously operated five standalone PABX telephony systems, each of which was between five and 25 years old. The company replaced these legacy systems in order to connect offices in five states and standardise on a unified communications system from Cisco Systems.

The solution, from Logicalis Australia, uses VoIP to provide centralised telephony services (such as interstate call transfer and contacts) and support a new mobile sales workforce strategy.

ARN went to tender in late 2010 and chose to upgrade its switching and routing hardware simultaneously with its telephony network.

The project, completed in June 2011, was delivered on time and within budget. Upon selection, ARN gave details of its new infrastructure

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plans to Logicalis which then designed, configured, tested and installed the new network to sit within ARN’s WAN. The rollout began at the Sydney head-office and progressed to Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Canberra.

“We’re in the business of providing entertainment to our listeners and advertising opportunities to our clients.

Consequently, how we communicate with these audiences is critical to our commercial operations,” said Graeme O’Connor, National Technology Director at Australian Radio Network.

“The Logicalis team was exceptional in the design and delivery of the project and worked well with our internal technical team to deliver a solution that fits into a wider strategy for ARN. Already our phone costs have been significantly reduced, and we’re realising the benefits of an improved mobile sales workforce,” said O’ Connor.

Logicalis

wf.net.au/L944

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25 // BEST OF 2011 www.VoiceandData.com.au

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DATA CENTRES

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NETWORK CRITICAL TO WESTERN HEALTH’S SUNSHINE CAMPUS

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estern Health is the major provider of acute health services in western metropolitan Melbourne. It employs 5000 staff on three campuses, serving a local population of nearly 700,000 that is increasing at 4% annually.

To meet growing demand, Western Health is constructing two new buildings on its Sunshine Hospital campus in Melbourne’s St Albans district. A new, single-storey radio therapy building covers 4500 m2 and a five-level teaching, training and research facility has 12,500 m2 of floor space. As in all healthcare facilities, the network infrastructure in the new buildings is critical to their success.

The original network tender documents called for separate connectivity to support voice, data, security, CCTV, building management systems and nurse call systems. When the team at Lanec, a Melbourne-based CommScope prestige business partner, studied the requirement, they proposed a different solution.

Lanec’s proposal was to use CommScope’s Systimax structured cabling solutions to build a single infrastructure able to serve all the systems. By making connectivity a ‘fourth utility’, alongside electricity, water and gas, the cost and complexity of many separate cabling installations were avoided.

With the simplified solution, high-performance 10G connectivity could be provided throughout the buildings. This gives a high level of ‘future proofing’ to all the systems it connects. New generations of more sophisticated equipment can be installed over many years to come without fear that network bandwidth will restrict the benefits.

“We were quickly convinced of the performance, cost and convenience advantages of the fourth utility approach. And, because we have to operate 24/7, anything that minimises the need for maintenance work is major, long-term advantage for us,” said Cecil D’Cruz of Western Health. “However, before going ahead, Lanec had to overcome uncertainty among building management and security system contractors on the project. It took a number of meetings and visits to

“ We were quickly convinced of the performance, cost and convenience advantages of the fourth utility approach. And, because we have to operate 24/7, anything that minimises the need for maintenance work is major, long-term advantage for us.”

Lanec’s dedicated demonstration facility to convince everyone that this was the right way to go.”

The network designed by Lanec has consolidation points (CPs) in all work areas. These have 20% redundant connections, allowing new information outlets to be added to the network very quickly. No more than 15 metres of cable is needed to connect any part of a work area to the nearest CP, making it fast to deploy new systems. CPs facilitate faster and more cost-effective changes to the cabling infrastructure and importantly, restrict any associated disruption to the area being worked on. “The use of CPs also helps in the initial installation phase, as final positioning of outlets changes right up to the completion of the job. Without CPs we would literally have dozens of change orders and associated cost and delay, but this is almost completely eliminated by the use of CPs,” says Slavnko Brinski, Lanec’s on-site Project Manager.

Consolidation points are connected to communications rooms via Systimax GigaSpeed X10D cabling. This has end-to-end performance comfortably exceeding the specifications of the Category 6A standard for data transmission at 10 Gbps over unshielded, twisted-pair connections. The extra performance makes all the systems more responsive. For instance, it allows very large files containing medical images to be delivered where they are needed with less delay.

Five communications rooms in the training building and one in the radiography facility are equipped with ergonomically advanced Systimax VisiPatch 360 patch panels. VisiPatch 360 panels are also used at the consolidations points. In total, the project required 190 km of low smoke zero halogen GigaSpeed X10D copper cabling Category 6A UTP, 2000 VisiPatch 360 four-pair leads and 2000 Category 6A RJ45 leads.

The integrated Systimax infrastructure is certified

by CommScope to deliver the specified performance from end to end. It has a 20-year warranty and application assurances.

CommScope Solutions Singapore Pte Ltd wf.net.au/J363

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DATA CENTRES

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University data centre revision leads to megawatt UPS Swinburne University of Technology has built a new data centre for primary IT activity, converting its old data centre into a disaster recovery centre. To power the new data centre, the university has installed two UPS units, each providing 500 kW of power.

At S w i n b u r n e , a n ex t e n s i ve WA N involving more than 150 servers, spans five Melbourne campuses and connects to a Malaysian campus to support over 50,000 academic and administrative staff and students. The network runs data, video and voice. It is the basis for the university’s phone system and is essential not only for providing teaching and learning services, but also for supporting research programs and student and administrative functions.

As Joe Cusmano, Data Centre Manager at Swinburne puts it, “Everything runs off the network. Therefore maintaining network services is critical. We can’t afford to have 2000 plus staff sitting around being nonproductive for hours because we have no phones and no computers.”

Recently, the university built a new data centre for primary IT activity and established the previous data centre as a new disaster recovery centre. In addition to providing a margin of safety and increasing IT capacity, (the new data centre houses a total of 144 server racks) the move has enabled Swinburne to implement green technologies, reducing its environmental footprint.

One network protection measure has been the use of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology. Swinburne has UPS system support for all critical IT equipment on every campus, with almost 60 Eaton UPS units installed for a combined rating of close to 3 MW. “Our most recent UPS purchases were two Eaton 9395 UPS systems for the new data centre,” Cusmano said. “Both are 500 kilowatts, backed up by a 1.1 MW generator.

Bus ducts, which sit under the floor, connect power to the systems, providing redundancy, so that if the power supply to one goes down, we simply switch over to the alternative power source. It gives us a great deal of flexibility.”

The task of keeping an eye on so many, and such widely spread, UPS systems has been made easier for Cusmano and his team through the use of Power Xpert power management software.

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The software centrally monitors all of Swinburne’s three- and single-phase UPS units over the WAN and provides reporting and analysis of power related activity. It includes single-line diagrams and UPS information and monitors system status of other elements in the critical power distribution system, such as the generators.

The information is continuously displayed to IT staff on a rolling screen in the University’s help desk area.

Al l sy s t e m a l a r m s a re f e d i n t o a distribution list of on-call IT personnel that includes their availability. The list finds the first available recipient and sends them an SMS alerting them to the problem. An email is also sent and the alarm will keep sending at a specified time interval until someone acknowledges it, or the alarm returns to normal.

“The reporting allows us to take a more proactive role, especially when it comes to energy management. We use the statistics and reports to identify ways of minimising power consumption. For example, if we’re running too many servers, perhaps we can do something about it. It’s part of our plan to find ways of re-using the data centre’s energy,” Cusmano adds.

The UPS technology has helped the university’s network performance record, with Cusmano saying, “We have an average annual uptime of 99.8% availability. We may have to drop part of the network from time to time for maintenance, but we have hardly any unexpected downtime at all.”

Eaton Industries Pty Ltd wf.net.au/L869

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DATA CENTRES

SPONSORED BY

Specsavers increases data centre capacity

Specsavers is the third-largest supplier of eye care in the world with an annual turnover of more than $2.1 billion in 2006. The company’s Australian and New Zealand manufacturing and retail operations relies on the 24/7 availability of applications as well as its communications network that spans across all its sites.

Supporting these applications and critical business data is the company’s Melbourne data centre.

“We have a single supply office and manufacturing plant in Australia that processes over 30,000 customer orders each week,” said Simon Baxter, Director of IT - Asia Pacific, Specsavers.

By 2009, Specsavers’ manufacturing site and data centre were reaching capacity. The company had limited space to deploy the extra hardware it needed to support new manufacturing lines and data and application requirements.

It had no power-generating capability and the UPS provided about 40 minutes of runtime during a power outage.

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Given the scale of the business and its dependence on the availability of its network, Specsavers needed to drastically increase its data centre capabilities and redundancy.

Specsavers decided to relocate its manufacturing site and data centre from Bertie Street, Melbourne, to a new site on Graham Street, Melbourne. The new data centre site was double the size of the previous site.

Specsavers’ IT team reviewed data centre solutions from several vendors, however it chose to partner with APC because of its outstanding service and the superior performance of its technology.

“We had worked before with APC and its partner Fujitsu and we were really pleased with the quality of the service they delivered it was a real differentiator,” said Baxter.

APC and Fujitsu worked together to provide a single point of contact partnership, ensuring a smooth implementation of the new data centre. APC solution architects and several APC power and cooling engineers invested many hours investigating and planning to ensure optimal results.

In March 2009, Specsavers commenced its new data centre fit out, deploying APC’s InfraStruXure (ISX) data centre architecture which consisted of one 48 kW Symmetra UPS, two 18 kW APC InRow cooling units, two 40 kW Aquacooler chillers, one APC Netbotz environmental monitoring unit and an APC ISX Central monitoring system.

It also deployed 40 servers and 150 virtual servers housed in 10 racks and used the diesel-fuelled backup generator installed at the site.

According to Baxter, one of the benefits associated with APC’s technology is its modularity and scalability.

APC’s ISX Central monitoring system collects, organises and distributes critical alerts, surveillance video and key information, providing Specsavers’ IT team with a unified view of its two data centre environments from anywhere on the network.

APC by Schneider Electric wf.net.au/H647

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NETWORKING

SPONSORED BY

HEALTH SERVICES PROVIDER BRIDGES FOUR CENTRES WITH WI-FI

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inner of the Primary Health Service of the Year 2010 Victorian Public Healthcare Awards, Inner South Community Health Service (ISCHS) is a major provider of health and community services in the inner southern region of Melbourne. Servicing a catchment of 190,000 people, ISCHS’s work spans the continuum of prevention, early intervention and long-term management delivering specialist expertise in working with highly marginalised groups.

Formed in 1993 through an amalgamation of health centres located near each other, today, ISCHS incorporates four health centres located in Prahran, South Melbourne and two in St Kilda.

“Key to providing timely and accessible health services to its clients are the speed and reliability of communications between the four service centres,” says Mike Diamond, ISCHS Business Support Services Manager.

ISCHS has implemented wireless links for the four sites over the last six years. The technology delivered a satisfactory service in the early years but over the later years reliability was compromised due to increased demands on the bandwidth - with dropped connections occurring too frequently. This was due to additional staff and notebooks, more bandwidth-hungry applications supporting growing administration requirements and a number of new e-health initiatives.

But modern administration needs and a growing client base was stretching the organisation’s network.

“Managing our client records alone was putting enormous pressure on the network,” said Diamond.

“We had the capacity but did not have the necessary speed to meet all our daily commitments.”

"Managing our client records alone was putting enor mous pressure on the network. We had the capacity but did not have the necessary speed to meet all our daily commitments."

Additionally, communication between the disparate sites was a challenge where voice contact between the four centres required local calls to be made as each was treated as a separate site rather than a handset extension of a central head office. This was cumbersome as well as costly.

“The imperative was to ensure that our backbone, as the communication heart of our organisation, did not miss a beat. We also needed some serious consolidation and centralisation of all our digital and voice communication requirements - including the associated hardware,” Diamond says.

Diamond was driven by three main considerations: the need for network high capacity between sites to meet the needs of increased traffic which the previous wireless WAN could not deliver; low latency to enable faster inter-site communications enabling VoIP applications (and in the future video); and faster speeds with more capacity at a lower cost base than carrier services were offering.

Diamond and his team explored what upgrade options were available to the organisation (which is dispersed over a 6-kilometre radius) in order to improve communications. ISCHS settled on a Ruckus Wireless point-to-point topology put forward

by Dycom Wireless Solutions, a Ruckus partner.

“We were impressed during the pilot phase at how cleanly the network performed. We measured throughput carefully and there were no latency or packet loss issues, critical to us as we were looking to deploy VoIP between the sites. Additionally, there were no interference issues,” says Diamond.

The system deployed consists of ZoneFlex 7731 wireless bridges in point-to-point configurations for ISCHS’s multisited wireless WAN. The old PTP wireless links were then redeployed as redundant backup links.

The proof of concept became a reality when all the links were replaced with wireless bridges and performance increased at a higher level than predicted by Dycom’s engineers. According to Diamond, latency across the three ‘hops’ (links) between each community centre is a 3-millisecond round trip.

Diamond says the solution offers “better throughput, the ability to centralise the management of the network, enabling us to reduce the number of fileservers, and the new functionality allowing free calls between the sites,” says Diamond.

Lan 1 Pty Ltd

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wf.net.au/J817

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10GbE not enough for digital council New Zealand’s Thames-Coromandel District Council has upgraded its network, in order to keep up with the demands of ongoing digitisation and online interaction projects.

Three years ago, Thames-Coromandel implemented a 10-Gigabit Ethernet networking backbone as part of an upgrade designed to accommodate the Council’s growth and to improve network performance and manageability.

Although staff numbers have remained fairly constant since installing the 10 Gb network backbone, initiatives to digitise the council records and interact electronically with residents have seen enormous increases in network traffic.

“As we digitise all our records, people are pulling up an electronic file instead of a paper file,” says Murray Foster, Information and Technology Manager for Thames-Coromandel District Council. “We are also interacting more and more with the residents electronically for activities such as letters and applications, and that is also driving more network traffic.

“We are now storing large files in our document management system like videos of court proceedings and support documentation for development applications,” says Foster. “Our

employees are also downloading videos and other bandwidth-demanding documents from the content management system.”

Thames-Coromandel realised that the staff productivity benefits it had reaped with increasing digitisation and online interaction would only be maintained if its network could keep up with demand.

Consequently, the council decided to upgrade the network switches to create extra redundancy at the core and higher capacity at the edge, as well as improved management capabilities.

D-Link and partner Lexel Systems recommended 3600 Series managed xStack switches. For its network core, the council implemented two 24-port switches as central network routers. For edge deployment, eight

24-port and three 48-port managed switches were installed. The switches greatly improved the council’s network performance with increased levels of redundancy and manageability.

The network upgrade caused little disruption to the council’s operations, taking around four weeks from start to completion.

“It was completely transparent,” Foster says of the deployment. “From an end-user perspective there was no visible sign that an upgrade was even happening.”

The networking infrastructure now provides the additional performance to support the council’s increasing levels of digitisation and online interaction.

Foster says the system offers full management capabilities throughout the network.

“Management tools are sitting over the top and we have a more dynamic management environment for the whole network. This ensures that we are getting optimum performance out of the system and avoiding bottlenecks and overloaded network segments.”

D-Link Australia Pty Ltd wf.net.au/K497

Mining the network for WAN efficiencies International oil and gas exploration company Ophir Energy has deployed WAN optimisation technology, allowing it to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and annual WAN support costs connecting its African, European and Australian offices.

Ophir Energy is the holding company of a group of companies with oil and gas exploration assets in a number of African locations.

The company has deployed Steelhead appliances from Riverbed Technology at seven of its locations, including Perth, London, Mtwara and Dar es Salaam (located in Tanzania), Malabo (located in Equatorial Guinea) and two offshore drilling vessels.

With the solution, the company has been able to boost the capacity of its IP-WAN and very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite links by up to five times. The expanded network capacity now allows Ophir Energy to perform data backup operations to a central data centre across its global network. This saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in storage infrastructure costs at its more remote locations and in associated support and maintenance costs each year. In addition, the solution has helped eliminate the network performance constraints that prevented the company from sharing its centralised file repository with its entire global workforce.

Ophir Energy employees regularly transfer large geoscience data files from office to office, and in the past were forced to send data on external hard drives via courier to get this done. With the solution in place, employees now transfer many gigabytes of data between Perth and London with ease.

And for the employees who travel, the solution enables mobile workers to connect to remote file shares using Windows Explorer - without any

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involvement from the support team - and get similar performance and productivity benefits.

“All our staff [can] connect to a single shared mailbox on our central Exchange server, which ensures that important messages and documents are logged correctly and never lost,” says Bill Johnson, IT Manager, Ophir Energy.

“Similarly, by enabling us to use Windows file shares across the WAN, we’ve been able to save scanned image data from all our scanners globally to a central file folder in Perth. This simplifies administration, and the [solution] provides remote users LAN-like access to even the largest scanned images from anywhere,” Johnson says.

Riverbed Technology Australia Pty Ltd wf.net.au/K636

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NETWORKING

SPONSORED BY

Multicampus wireless for mobile med majors

Victoria’s Deakin University has deployed a federated wireless infrastructure upgrade, known as ‘DeakinSecure’. The new network is designed to improve connectivity for the increasing number of students spending course time in remote health locations such as public hospitals.

Deakin University has around 39,000 students and of these around 30% spend significant amounts of time off campus through the year. Many students on the four-year postgraduate medical program spend two years of practical training at hospitals and medical clinics in the South West Alliance of Rural Health (SWARH), at locations hundreds of kilometres from the university campus.

Due to the increasing use of technology in education - particularly in the medical field - the there was a need for a secure communications network between Deakin and SWARH. Prior to the deployment of the new system, such access was provided by specific hardwired locations, which severely restricted intersite communications. Users suffered downtime and restricted access to vital campus-based information, making it difficult to work while outside of the Deakin campus.

Security was a particular concern when evaluating possible solutions; protecting the hospitals’ operational systems and patient data

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was critical, as was the protection of Deakin’s student records.

To fulfil these requirements, Dimension Data established an encrypted ethernet over IP (EoIP) tunnel between SWARH and Deakin, with technology from Cisco.

The deployment delivers connectivity for Deakin students working in placements at hospitals and medical clinics across southwestern Victoria, enabling increased efficiency and mobility to user devices including laptops, smartphones, tablets and the popular iPad for students both on and off campus.

Peter Brusco, Deakin’s Executive Director, Information Technology, believes that the new connectivity solves a long-standing problem encountered by many universities.

“Our previous hardwired solution limited students working at off-campus sites in many ways. They did not have easy access to any of the high-quality services available to students on campus, severely impacting their ability to work effectively. Video tutorials and other increasingly popular services were not available due to slow connections and restricted connectivity,” he said. ”This solution is very much in line with our strategy to deliver ‘anywhere, anytime’ access to services for all of our students and staff.”

The connection is physically located in Deakin’s Teaching, Training and Research (TTR) centre at Geelong Hospital, where both

organisations are fully protected by firewalls.

Only after being successfully authenticated is a user connected to Deakin’s network.

Garry Druitt, Executive Officer, South West Alliance of Rural Health (Victoria), believes the innovative deployment is a model for any organisation with affiliated operations.

“We are trying to facilitate the training of doctors across our region and the best way to do this is to ensure that we provide them with access to educational resources while they are in our hospitals, without jeopardising the security of both our organisations.

“Effectively, with this project we have extended the capabilities of both our fixed and wireless infrastructure to meet the different needs of SWARH staff and Deakin’s medical students. Our challenge now is to see how we can adapt the security profile to provide these students with access to specific SWARH resources to further their training, such as clinical applications.”

Craig Warren, Operational Service Provision Manager, Geelong Waterfront Campus, Deakin University, says that the new infrastructure “has made a significant impact on the efficiency of our communications between our campus and remote locations”.

Dimension Data Australia wf.net.au/K498

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Bonded broadband a shot in the arm for 50 Kaliber Films Growth at video media specialist 50 Kaliber Films in inner-city Melbourne meant that the company needed to increase the download and upload speeds of its internet connection.

The company produces corporate films for use in web applications, corporate videos and web-based marketing. With average client file sizes of around 90 MB and master files up to 2 GB, 50 Kaliber’s ADSL2+ connection just wasn’t up to the task.

Managing Director Dieter Kahsnitz said typically more than 20 client files and several master files would be uploaded every day via its FTP site.

“It was just taking too long for file transfers and was affecting staff productivity. We looked at upgrading to new technology such as SHDSL and ethernet over copper, but these are quite costly,” said Kahsnitz.

To facilitate these transfers, the company opted for an IP broadband bonding system from Fusion Broadband, which joins multiple broadband connections together, creating one connection.

The network at 50 Kaliber is built across two offices. Each office has an ADSL2+ Annex M service. The main production office has the most bandwidth intensive requirements for downloading and uploading.

Between each office is a VPN, which is used to manage data transfers as well as VoIP calls. The bonding system installation involved adding a second ADSL2+ line into the main office.

With the new system, the original Billion ADSL2+ modem/router is retained. The bonding system is physically installed between

50 Kaliber’s existing router and two external ADSL modems. All other settings and VPN functions are retained. The only changed setting is that the existing modem router is now used as a router only.

No internal network changes have been made except to issue new IP addresses for the VPN between offices. The installation is fundamentally transparent to the internal network. The WAN connections are presented to the internet with a single IP address.

The speeds of both of 50 Kaliber’s connections were tested before the installation. The results showed downlinks of 13 and 12 megabits per second, and uplink speeds with an average of 1.6 Mbps and 800 Kbps.

Post-installation tests show that downlink speeds now consistently exceed 20 Mbps, with a peak result close to the sum of the two connections.

Uplink speeds are consistently close to the sum of the two connections bonded. Ping times are approximately the same between the single and the bonded connection.

Should any of the connected services fail some internet connectivity remains, as long as one line is active.

If 50 Kaliber should need more bandwidth in future, the company can continue to add xDSL connections, to a maximum of six.

Fusion Broadband wf.net.au/K565

ISP feeds hungry customers with web caching New Zealand ISP CallPlus has implemented a web caching solution to help manage a 50% growth in customer hunger for internet content from outside New Zealand.

The ISP’s consumer and b u s i n e s s c u s t o m e rs h a v e demonstrated an increasing d e m a n d fo r r i c h w e b 2 . 0 content, particularly video, from international sources such as YouTube, Facebook and other sites.

CallPlus estimates that 90-95% of its traffic is for international content.

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The company has faced the dual challenge of keeping its subscribers happy by providing a fast, highquality internet experience and the need to reduce its operational costs due to escalating consumption demands for expensive international internet bandwidth.

The ISP selected Blue Coat’s CacheFlow 5000 appliances to address these requirements.

The appliances can cache web content to reduce bandwidth consumption and to boost the quality of an internet experience.

Following the deployment, customers of the ISP’s consumer brand, Slingshot, can experience faster downloads and web page loading and smoother, more quickly delivered video.

Initial trials of the web caching appliances, conducted by CallPlus over a three-month period, showed a reduction in its bandwidth consumption of more than 40%.

At the same time, the speed of content delivery and quality of video experience also increased, due to the use of caching.

“Once we deployed the caching technology, we were serving web traffic considerably faster than our main competitors,” says Adrian Dick, Chief Technology Officer, CallPlus. “[The solution] both reduced costs and improved customer experience; it was the only solution to meet our payback hurdle.”

Blue Coat Systems Australia Pty Ltd wf.net.au/L161

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NETWORKING

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ROUTING REPLACEMENT REGIME UPS DATA CENTRE’S CORE STRENGTH

M

elbourne data centre operator Micron21 has deployed a series of core routers as the basis of a network expansion project, increasing its ethernet performance a hundred-fold.

Micron21 has been providing geographically redundant, fault-tolerant IP networking services to clients from its large data centre based in the outer east part of Melbourne for 10 years. Founded on the philosophy that quality of service is paramount, the company has made significant investments in securing redundant optic fibre and licensed microwave connections to its own outer data centre.

This has allowed it to control every aspect of the facility, which is monitored around the clock by local staff.

Earlier this year, the company began an overhaul of its network and data centre to pave the way for a new generation of high-availability services.

Micron21’s goal for its network expansion project was to support the deployment of 160 additional data centre racks over 18 months that would increase the hosting provider’s high-performance service offerings while improving security capabilities to further safeguard its customers’ most mission-critical data.

With our new core routing infrastructure in place, we are increasing our ethernet performance capacity from 1 gigabit to 100 gigabit, which is well beyond today’s customer requirements.

The company was also looking for a smoother migration path towards supporting higher levels of virtualisation and integration with its existing usagebased billing system, as well as the ability to scale to meet increasing bandwidth demands well into the future, without compromising application performance or uptime.

After a careful evaluation process, Micron21 selected the Brocade MLXe Series core routers as the network foundation for its expansion project; the platforms met the company’s performance requirements while integrating with its existing IP networking infrastructure.

James Braunegg, Infrastructure Manager at Micron21, says the routers were chosen because they stood out for their “performance, availability, scalability and security, offering a very competitive total cost of ownership”.

At each Micron21 data centre, the company has deployed a pair of the core routers, which are connected through point-to-point fibre. The routing mesh is the foundation for the company’s new geographically redundant IP services, including co-location, virtual dedicated server and custom solution services.

The routers are intended to deliver multiterabit scalability with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) wirespeed density. The router’s scalability offers Micron21 features including full IPv4 and IPv6 routing, Metro Ethernet Services, MPLS and MPLS VPN. The routers allow Micron21 to address new service opportunities and simplify operations.

The routers’ simplified architecture has allowed Micron21 to leverage its existing assets and establish new standards for uptime, while introducing technologies that will support its transition to fully virtualised data centre operations. Stage one will see Micron21 commence the process of flattening its network architecture, removing the existing second-tier aggregation switches.

By futureproofing the data centre with Brocade’s routers, Micron21 will also be one step ahead of client demand.

“With our new core routing infrastructure in place, we are increasing our ethernet performance capacity from 1 gigabit to 100 gigabit, which is well beyond today’s customer requirements,” says Braunegg.

“Yet it allows us to meet current service demands profitably.”

Brocade Communications Systems Inc wf.net.au/K901

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NETWORKING

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NPO achieves 97% WAN traffic reduction

Mental health support organisation, Mind Australia, has deployed WAN optimisation technology, allowing it to reduce traffic congestion, save money and enable its mobile staff to provide better services and support out in the field, especially in regional areas.

Mind Australia is a community not-for-profit organisation providing counselling and other related services to more than 4500 patients with mental health issues in Victoria and South Australia.

The organisation runs a thick-client application for its client management system, connecting 600-plus staff across more than 50 offices, using expensive WAN links.

Mind Australia wanted more throughput over its WAN links, but buying more bandwidth was not realistic, financially. When looking for a solution, the company looked at two key factors: accelerating file serving and enhancing response times for applications that were dependant on a client-server relationship.

After deploying Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead, Mind Australia managed to reduce the transfer of traffic across the WAN by 97% - for every 100 MB that would have had to be transferred previously, it now only requires 3 MB. But the ROI goes beyond time and cost savings. Mind Australia would not have been able to rollout a thick-client application across the existing WAN links without the new solution. The organisation would have had to have used a different product for its client management system.

Mind Australia also deployed Steelhead Mobile to give its staff, a large percentage of which work in the field or between offices, LAN-

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like access to the primary application. This would help them work more productively, but also significantly reduce the sense of isolation that is part-and-parcel of their daily work.

“One of the ways we combat staff isolation is by using this type of technology to provide a responsive and fast service,” said James Kent, director of IT services, Mind Australia. “People who are regularly out in the field and delivering services, alone or with little contact with other staff members, require stable services. This is fundamental to increasing their satisfaction and their connectedness with the organisation and with the people they support.”

Being able to take a lot of traffic off the WAN has enabled Mind Australia to look at implementing other technologies to further benefit the business. The organisation is rolling out Microsoft Lync to handle all voice services - this would not have been possible if the organisation did not have the availability in the data connections.

With the federal government investing $1.5 billion for mental health in the next few years, Mind Australia expects its business will expand significantly and therefore needed a solution that would easily scale in line with its growth.

Riverbed Technology Australia Pty Ltd

wf.net.au/L868

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SECURITY

Keeping staff productive with content filtering Perth company Wrays Intellectual Property, found itself with a dilemma. The company wanted to keep its employees focused and productive by controlling their use of the internet, but didn’t want to stop them from using websites they needed to use to do their jobs.

The company also wanted to make sure inappropriate content is not accessed on its network.

Wrays solved the problem by utilising the content filtering features on Endian’s unified threat management system.

The solution offers the ability to specify which employees can

access the internet, what they can view and when they can view it.

Andy Crowhurst, IT Services Manager at Wrays, says that the system’s content filtering capabilities “allow us to set controls and exclusions on certain sites and web content to ensure our resources are protected from misuse and that inappropriate content is not accessible on our network”.

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Deployment was straightforward, according to Crowhurst, and the system provides a low ongoing cost of ownership.

“Our capital and operating costs have been reduced and our network is more secure,” he says.

Crowhurst says that the solution’s content filtering features provide an additional security measure for the firm’s network.

“Wrays is in the process of virtualising its IT infrastructure and the [solution] complements this strategy,” he says.

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SECURITY

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BRIGHTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL KEEPS ITS NETWORK SAFE

B

righton Grammar School is an Anglican boys school based in Melbourne. Its focus is to tailor teaching methods and programs to meet the unique learning styles and interests of boys and to create a curriculum that engages, excites and challenges each student.

To support the educational and administrative aspects of the school, Brighton Grammar maintains an extensive information technology infrastructure including a 10 GB backbone, a storage area network, a VMware virtualised environment plus 600 computers, 30 notebooks and more than 50 thin client computers. In addition, the school’s recently established research arm, the Crowther Centre located in the Melbourne CBD, connects to the main school campus via a virtual private network. The system is used by approximately 1500 on-site staff and students plus a number of parents who remotely log in to the school portal via secure links.

David Young, Brighton Grammar’s Information Technology (IT) Manager, notes that modern teaching and classroom practices, and business operations place a huge reliance on connectivity. “That’s why we run an enterprise-class network and we need enterprise-class devices to make sure it all works. Users expect the system to be up 100% of the time and it’s our job to make sure that everything works.”

This makes network integrity and security essential considerations for Young. “We have an enormous diversity of user requirements with students from three years of age through to adults of 70 or 80 using school resources,” Young explains. “All have their own specific requirements that we need to address, whether it’s from a duty-of-care point of view or a research perspective. For example, we have to be aware of not letting users access sites that contain inappropriate information. Therefore, we need to be able to identify traffic and build appropriate rules for that traffic.”

“This technology is not something that you just put in and forget about. It needs to be managed, maintained and upgraded. As everything else behind the scenes gets bigger and bigger, so must the firewall.”

Young deployed a WatchGuard solution as a firewall and web service or mail service proxy for internal resources. “We chose WatchGuard because of its ease of management. It was - and remains - straightforward, simple to operate and configure,” Young says. “The information that we get from WatchGuard and from our logs means that we know where things are supposedly going and what’s happening with the network. We keep intrusion detection turned on and periodically we test it from outside the organisation to make sure there are no security holes.”

The landscapes changes. That was eight years ago and Brighton Grammar is now onto its third generation of firewall solutions. Instead of one appliance, the school has two enterprise-level WatchGuard XTM 8 series appliances at the main campus, with one acting as a failover for the other. At the school’s remote sites, another WatchGuard Firebox X Core series device is deployed for VPN connectivity within the network to give even greater flexibility and security.

The school also subscribes to WatchGuard’s LiveSecurity Service, enabling Young to receive regular software updates, early warning of newly identified threats, practical advice and guidance, and professional support.

Young points out that any firewall needs to be regularly reviewed. “This technology is not something that you just put in and forget about. It needs to be managed, maintained and upgraded. As everything else behind the scenes gets bigger and bigger, so must the firewall.”

Another ongoing challenge is the need to adapt security to meet changes in the technology infrastructure.

It’s not just a matter of desktop computers any more.

Network users demand access via wireless notebooks, smartphones, iPads and any number of portable devices.

“It’s a challenging environment to try to secure,” Young acknowledges. “We’re always trying to keep a step ahead of our users,” said Young.

WatchGuard Technologies Inc wf.net.au/H865

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STORAGE

oOh!media manages data growth with Hitachi SAN infrastructure

Outdoor shopping centre signs and large-format billboards all form part of Australia’s $427 million out-of-home advertising industry. Within this sector, oOh!media Group, operating from offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney, produces and sends large data files to and from its other offices and clients.

The biggest challenge for the company is to ensure its storage capacity keeps pace with its increasing data usage. In just 12 months, oOh!media’s data inventory tripled from just over one terabyte to three terabytes, meaning the business had almost reached its maximum storage capacity.

“We keep photographic records of all our outdoor billboard campaigns and signage, which are all in high-resolution format,” said Simon Yeandle, Chief Financial Officer, oOh!media.

“We also need to provide clients with proof of posting for all new campaigns, and that alone means up to 8000 photos per fortnight coming in and out of the business. As a result, we were tripling our storage year on year, and our infrastructure simply couldn’t keep up.”

“Media file sizes are also growing substantially - not twofold, but fourfold. This, coupled with a change in media format from static to multimedia, is further increasing file sizes. In some cases the file sizes were so large that we would run out of disk space and

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the network would fail, resulting in downtime of at least three hours for each incident. That downtime could result in massive costs to the business and would put us at risk of losing vital data and business development opportunities in the process. It just wasn’t sustainable.” oOh!media outsources all of its network IT requirements to Regal Information Technology, which recommended considering a storage area network infrastructure. Regal Information Technology deployed the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2100 - a reliable, scalable storage system that provides enterprise-grade performance to manage the company’s data and other business applications, and enable virtualisation of its existing servers. Hitachi’s TrueCopy software - a remote mirroring feature built into the AMS 2100 that saves data to the primary and secondary site simultaneously would also provide oOh!media with the ability to create a disaster recovery site in the near future.

“We were looking for a storage area network that would virtualise and better utilise oOh!media’s existing servers, as well as provide additional storage capacity,” said David Cleminson, Technical Director at Regal Information Technology. “The AMS 2100 provides the business with stability from a redundancy perspective, high data availability across all its offices and reduced downtime for

system maintenance. The Hitachi solution has increased storage capacity from just over three terabytes to 17 terabytes and also provides the ability to scale storage upwards and outwards with extra capacity and performance, quickly adapting with oOh!media’s exponential and sometimes erratic data growth.”

“If we had stayed with our existing infrastructure, there is no way we could have continued to grow as a business,” says Yeandle.

“Once you reach your data limit, this starts to have serious repercussions on business processes and performance. Since implementing the Hitachi AMS solution we’re no longer restricted, have removed the risk to our business and now have the performance and scalability to handle whatever file sizes are coming into the business.” oOh!media has plans to use its Hitachi central storage solution to replicate data between two SANs, so they have a disaster recovery solution in place. This will provide the organisation with a business continuity plan that provides greater stability and peace of mind.

Hitachi Australia Ltd

wf.net.au/J020

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STORAGE

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Web host and streaming provider Hostworks has deployed a backup, recovery and deduplication system, affording the company 20 TB of deduplicated data capacity, which ultimately allowed it to support the 2010 FIFA World Cup websites of Australian broadcaster SBS. Hostworks provides web hosting, demand management, hightransaction websites and video streaming services to some of Australia’s most well-known brands, including the ABC, Network TEN, Ticketek, realestate.com.au and many others.

In 2009, the company looked at ways to improve backup for its dedicated hosting customers. Previously it had used a traditional model of backing up to disk, then to tape. After a period of consideration, the company settled on EMC’s Avamar for backup, recovery and deduplication.

The decision was in part based on a test with existing data that suggested Hostworks could deduplicate up to 99% of its data for some customers, reduce backup windows from hours to minutes and dispense with backup tapes.

In October that year, the company deployed the solution across a fournode grid that provided 8 TB of deduplicated data capacity. By applying source-based deduplication when replicating data between the hosting provider’s Sydney and Adelaide data centres, Hostworks’ salespeople could offer a competitive price for disaster recovery services. “[The solution] cost-effectively met our need for source-based deduplication, and effective backup and recovery,” said Adrian Britton, General Manager of Technology, Strategy and Innovation, Hostworks.

Since then, the success of the deployment has prompted the company

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Web host scores deduplication goal

to expand the size of its grid to 10 nodes, giving it approximately 20 TB of deduplicated data capacity. Hostworks now retains customer data online for 30 days, while replicating it daily to a second data centre to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster.

As a marker of the system’s success, Hostworks’ business model enabled TV and radio broadcaster SBS to access capacity to support peak demand for its World Game website for the duration of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. During the tournament, the World Game site received 1.5 million unique visitors, and delivered more than 25 million page impressions and 2 million video views.

EMC Corporation

wf.net.au/K188

Storage management simplified at research institute

The data collected and analysed at Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) in Sydney could unlock the mysteries of a range of conditions, from cancer to brain conditions and developmental abnormalities.

CMRI researchers study human genetics and cell biology and share the findings with a global network of scientists in an effort to develop ways to prevent and treat these illnesses. When CMRI added two new technologies to enhance research, the IT group knew it was time to update the storage area network (SAN) that housed its research data.

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The team also saw opportunities to protect data more effectively and reduce the time and money spent on IT administration while also supporting the institute’s critical research. “We wanted a better way to back up research data. If a scientist made an error or mistakenly deleted a file, he or she might have to take a full day to run the experiment again,” says Darryn Capes-Davis, CMRI’s ICT Manager.

With storage administration interfering with the critical medial research carried out at the institute, CMRI was also looking for a less timeconsuming way to manage its data. “Our small IT group was spending way too much time on storage management. We wanted a solution that would let us focus on new projects so we could better contribute to the success of the institute,” says Capes-Davis.

After considering solutions from other vendors, the IT group selected a Fluid Data storage architecture from Compellent.

The primary SAN spreads data across two tiers. The first tier uses fast fibre channel drives to store active data, while the second tier uses cost-effective SATA drives for inactive files.

With Compellent’s Fluid Data technology, particularly its automated tiered storage feature, CMRI has been able to migrate data from the first to second tier of storage based on predefined rules.

The secondary Compellent SAN, which uses cheaper SATA drives, enables the IT group to reduce its backup window and replicate frequent snapshots to a remote site located 20 km away.

CMRI can now automatically create spaceefficient snapshots of data called Replays to help protect research data. Replays use minimal storage by only duplicating new data written since the previous snapshot in the file.

Using the Thin Replication technology, the IT group replicates copies of snapshots to its remote site. “If something goes wrong at our primary site, we have a much better opportunity to recover data now than before. “Compellent also makes it simple to set up rules for how long to retain each Replay - and it just runs automatically, without us having to manage it,” says Capes-Davis.

Compellent wf.net.au/J051

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STORAGE

Aeronautical R&D firm evades contractual missile

To avoid commercial penalties for not delivering on contractual commitments, the Australian branch of electronic information systems business Thales has implemented a multiple-site storage system including disaster recovery, virtualisation and deduplication.

One of Thales’s Australian operations develops and supplies air-traffic control systems that are used by the world’s airports. The development hub for this solution is based in Melbourne, Australia.

This Melbourne operation was managing a rapidly expanding IT environment. Part of the company’s legacy storage system was responsible for around 70 million files, or 6 terabytes of data, which was increasing by about 1 million files per month.

The existing storage system was experiencing performance-based issues, leading to downtime and loss of productivity, which, if allowed to continue, would have led to significant commercial penalties for not delivering on commercial contractual commitments.

The inefficient older system was also causing backups to take longer than necessary, diverting resources away from higher-priority tasks and delaying project delivery. Thales also needed a reliable, efficient disaster recovery solution.

Thales teamed up with NetApp to develop and implement a storage solution that offered scalability for future growth; simple, web-based management; deduplication to maximise efficient use of disk space; snapshot replication for faster backups; and functionality to implement a comprehensive disaster recovery solution in the near future.

The solution included a storage system for the Melbourne development centre and a production system in Thales’s Sydney office. It also included a system for Sydney to be used for disaster recovery, and to replicate data from the company’s other key Australian sites.

In addition, Thales is in the process of virtualising its infrastructure with VMware technology, with the goal of a 99% virtual/1% physical infrastructure. The Sydney server farm was upgraded from 20 host servers

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housing 220 virtual machines to 200 virtual machines on six hosts. This process is continuing across Australia at Thales’s 35 other locations.

“As part of this upgrade process, it’s important for us to be able to reduce our physical and virtual footprints, so virtualising, replicating and deduplicating are all very important tools for us,” says Rishi Trivedi, Systems Engineer - Site Lead.

Since implementing the storage system, Thales has experienced several technical and business benefits.

“When we initially installed the new system, we experienced a seamless cutover of 70 million files one evening from Sydney to Melbourne, and there wasn’t a single user call logged the next morning. We work with advanced users and developers, so we expected calls and we didn’t receive any, because they couldn’t find any issues and there was no downtime. In fact, there has been no downtime since the system was installed,” says Trivedi.

“With thin provisioning, we can allocate space quickly and efficiently,” Trivedi went on. “[The system lets] us back up our data in minutes, compared to the hours it took previously. These simple tools, combined with the fact that we have no jobs logged from customers, has resulted in massive time savings and soaring productivity, meaning important projects are progressing quicker than ever before.”

Thales implemented deduplication across all of its data, which immediately reduced the storage space required from 10 TB to approximately 5 TB. Trivedi says the new system “is like night and day compared to the old system. The IT team loves it for its reporting capabilities and ease of administration. We now have the ability to see how much storage space each user is consuming, which we didn’t before.”

NetApp wf.net.au/L164

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VIRTUALIASATION

Port sinks struggling SAN for storage virtualisation software Ports of Auckland has put down its ageing storage area network (SAN) in favour of storage virtualisation software, giving the organisation a failover time of minutes, increased storage performance and reduced infrastructure costs. The company is one of New Zealand’s leading port companies, serving the country’s vital international trade with a range of cargo handling and logistics. It’s responsible for running two maritime ports and an inland port in the Auckland region.

Ports of Auckland is operational around the clock, every day of the year.

This places a tremendous responsibility on the company’s IT team to keep critical systems available and performing up to expectations at all times.

All of these critical systems are heavily dependent on the company’s SAN infrastructure, which is also tasked with storing many images and videos for training and incident

management, and will shortly be required to support a new terminal management system.

The organisation was an early adopter of server virtualisation and today 95% of its server infrastructure is virtualised. But its ageing SAN infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the demands of a highly virtualised environment - it was limiting critical application performance, required too much downtime for physical maintenance or upgrades, and could not furnish the high availability demanded by port operations.

In order to alleviate these pains, the company brought in IT solutions provider Datacom to design and implement a storage virtualisation solution based on DataCore's SANsymphony.

The new storage infrastructure delivers several benefits for Ports of Auckland: ‘no-panic’ business continuity and seamless maintenance, better performance and storage utilisation, and long-term cost savings and peace of mind. Because the solution manages all the storage at both sites as a single pool of virtual disks, automatically routing I/O requests to the appropriate hardware regardless of where it is, the IT team no longer has to worry about site failure.

“We can suffer a complete SAN array failure at one site and have the systems carry on running without any manual intervention, which is a huge benefit for us. Our return to operation in a complete site failure is literally only minutes,” says Lead Systems Engineer Craig Beetlestone.

Before the deployment, the IT team had to failover the system to the secondary site to allow for a scheduled SAN outage, which had an unacceptable impact on port operations. Now, the IT team uses the ‘zerodowntime’ maintenance features of the storage virtualisation solution to do operational maintenance without affecting the rest of the business.

Performance has also improved under the new system. “Even with SQL servers that use a significant amount of disk I/O, we barely see any impact at all because the effective disk latency stays extremely low even when we throw a large amount of I/O through to the controllers,” Beetlestone says.

DataCore Software Corporation wf.net.au/K501

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WIRELESS

WARATAHS TACKLE FAN ENGAGEMENT WITH MOBILITY

T

he HSBC Waratahs rugby team has taken a step to communicate more directly with members and supporters by implementing mobile information services. Mobility is enabling the team website to become a larger part of match travel arrangements, the pre-game conversation, and in-game reporting.

In early 2011, Kym Aust-Howlett, Waratahs Rugby General Manager Commercial, met with technology and consulting services company, EcoView Global, to discuss delivering the team’s website content to mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs. “These days people are largely time poor and we recognised that mobile services offer a way of taking the information to our supporters so that they don’t have to go looking for it,” said Aust-Howlett.

E coV i e w i n t ro d u c e d Wa ra t a h s Ru g by t o BlinkMobile Interactive, a mobile service delivery platform that could draw data directly from the team’s website and re-purpose it ‘on-the-run’ for delivery to mobile devices. It was an alternative to creating and maintaining new web pages or rewriting material specifically for mobile delivery.

The solution is capable of supporting a range of mobile devices, including BlackBerrys and Nokia phones, as well as Android devices, iPhones and iPads.

“Rugby has a wide demographic of supporters from older members through to a tech-savvy younger supporter base,” said Aust-Howlett. “We liked BlinkMobile because it gave us a solution that

“These days people are largely time poor and we recognised that mobile services offer a way of taking the information to our supporters so that they don’t have to go looking for it.” - Kym AustHowlett, Waratahs

respected our older audience and the devices they tend to use, but it also gave us the ability to engage the youth segment.”

Given its assessment of the solution, Waratahs Rugby gave the project the green light.

“Building the mobility capability was very easy from our side,” said Aust-Howlett. “We’d already looked at our current website, looked at the traffic and found what people were interested in.”

“These were the pages we wanted to optimise for the mobile realm, so we worked with EcoView to create the relevant architecture for the site,” she said.

Waratahs Rugby’s internal graphic designer also worked closely with the team, creating a consistent look and feel that remained true to the organisation’s branding.

A mobile-enabled site was created covering Wa ra t a h s n e w s , p l a ye r p ro f i l e s , g a m e d a y information including times and venue, live scores and results and membership services. The pages also meshed with several third-party services, such as travel and transport links to and from the games venues, and integrated with a ticketing service.

If a supporter was out with friends on a Friday night, the site would allow them to identify when and where the next Waratahs game was being held, view information about how to get to the game and purchase their tickets in advance.

“It took us just two weeks to go live,” said Aust-Howlett. “All the information is pulled directly from the main website. We are very clear on the requirements of our brand and knew what we wanted from the mobile site, so it became a very easy process.”

“It became a complete extension of our marketing campaign,” she said. “The site is very much working in the sense we wanted; it has achieved our initial objectives of getting key information about the game to our supporters to make their experience a more seamless one.”

“Just like any sporting organisation, Waratahs Rugby is limited in resources, so efficiencies are extremely important. With EcoView’s help, the solution we adopted has allowed us to achieve this,” said Aust-Howlett.

Blink Mobile Technologies

wf.net.au/L926

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Himalayan trek puts sat phone to the test During a recent trek through the Himalayas, an 11-person mountaineering team put a satellite phone to the test, using it to call home, conduct business communications and act as a safety communications device if anything went wrong.

The mountaineering team was on an expedition to visit schools and Australian Himalayan Foundation (AHF) teacher training courses and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first school built by Sir Edmund Hillary, just 25 kilometres from Everest.

The mountaineers led the inaugural 18-day ‘Chairman’s Trek’ in the Himalayas, in April, in support of the AHF, which continues the work of Sir Edmund Hillary to help the Himalayan people through education, health and environmental programs.

The expedition team was supported in their quest by the IsatPhone Pro satellite phone, from Inmarsat.

The device is capable of operating at temperatures ranging from -20 to +55°C, has a talk time of up to eight hours and can operate for 100 hours on standby. It can text, email and send location data in addition to making phone calls.

“We were at 14,500 ft (above 4000 m) and the phone was compact, light and super efficient. We had 100% reliable communications from Namche Bazaar,” said Simon Balderstone, AHF Chairman and a member of the 1984 First Australian Everest expedition.

After the first glimpse of Everest at Namche, the group continued to Khumjung, where Sir Edmund Hillary built his first school in the years after he summitted Everest. The trekkers enjoyed three days of celebrations, hosted by the school, before they headed to Lukla for a return flight to Kathmandu. The 11-person Chairman’s Trek team was accompanied by 29 porters and support staff.

“The [device] made the team feel very secure and they were able to stay in touch with home whenever needed throughout the trek. I was able to conduct some urgent Foundation business as well,” Balderstone said.

The AHF plans to continue using the device during visits to its Himalayan projects in the future, including isolated parts of Nepal and India.

Inmarsat Services Ltd

wf.net.au/L867

Salvation Army enlists mobility for aged care centres The Salvation Army Aged Care Plus, which has offered care to the aged community since 1899 in Australia, has deployed a fleet of ruggedised tablets and medical devices across two of its facilities.

The organisation delivers care through several services including independent living units, low- and high-care facilities and community care packages. It serves approximately 1400 residents and has 1100 care and clinical staff at more than 17 sites across New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory.

According to Mahfuz Matin, IT systems manager for The Salvation Army Aged Care Plus, the organisation recently undertook an extensive program to modernise their facilities.

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“Staff used standard laptops and desktops.

Care personnel had to engage in a timeconsuming process of hand-writing care notes beside the resident’s bed, and then electronically updating this information via a computer kiosk or when they return to the office,” Matin says.

The organisation initially launched a trial of the Panasonic Toughbook CF-C1 convertible tablet PCs and Toughbook CF-H1 Mark II Mobile Clinical Assistants (MCA) at one New South Wales facility and one Queensland facility.

Ultimately, the organisation has procured and deployed 16 tablet PCs and 13 Toughbook MCAs across two facilities, with plans to deploy both models across all Aged Care Plus facilities.

“Our aim for the Toughbook C1 is to use these as an alternative to computer kiosks - meaning our care personnel will be able to better manage clinical and care documentation,” Matin says.

According to Matin, the convertible tablets suit the purposes of the organisation well.

“The versatile keyboard and multitouch screen for finger and electronic stylus are perfect for staff to use for both clinical documentation and medication management,” he says.

Meanwhile, the MCA device helped the organisation to improve medication management.

“Our care personnel can rely on the device to perform even in challenging conditions,” Matin says.

“Care personnel have noticed a significant improvement and simplification in medication management since the deployment of the [MCA] - particularly as it is highly durable and able to be fully sanitised, which of course is crucial in the health industry,” he added.

Panasonic Australia wf.net.au/K187

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WLAN gives students a technological fair go Students and teachers at Melbourne’s Bialik College have better access to networked resources and the Internet thanks to a new virtualised wireless LAN. The college, which has children from kindergarten through to year 12, provides more than 1060 students with a Jewish and general education.

Rapid proliferation of technology has made it essential for Bialik to provide its students with a technological education as they prepare for tertiary studies. Students are encouraged to discover the benefits of online connection and practical online tools, such as email and search engines.

Students and staff increasingly used their personal computers, laptops, tablets, tablet computers and smartphone devices on campus. However, without a wireless network, access was limited to wired connections. Students and staff were not able to obtain network or internet access consistently enough to maximise the learning experience.

“We wanted all our students to have a fair go at using the school’s network with internet access,” says David Micallef, head of technology for Bialik College. “We already have access to a number of devices with the capability for wireless internet connectivity.

The only thing that was hindering our progress was the lack of a wireless network solution for the campus.”

Bialik College explored a number of wireless LAN solutions, eventually settling on a Meru Networks virtualised wireless LAN from Wavelink Communications.

The network provides wireless coverage across the Bialik campus and supports 802.11

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a/b/g/n devices. The network is simple to install and manage as it doesn’t require channel planning and allows all access points be deployed on the same channel.

Each access point is deployed at full power, delivering greater coverage with fewer access points. Adding capacity for dense user environments involves adding a channel, and performance for bandwidth-intensive devices is improved.

Bialik staff completed full deployment of the Meru controller and 26 access points themselves, in less than one week.

“Unlike solutions from other vendors, there was no need to hire additional consultants to

deploy the product, as it was all done inhouse,” says Micallef.

Staff and students can use the school’s network with internet access from anywhere on campus. There have been no connectivity interruptions or issues associated with channel interference.

“It gave our school an easy-to-implement, problem-free solution and the benefits definitely outweighed the costs,” says Micallef.

Wavelink

wf.net.au/K900

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