Puma modernises telephony systems

Puma, the global sportswear brand, has replaced the ageing BT Meridien telephone system by migrating to a new internet protocol (IP) telephony technology.

The company decided to update its telephony infrastructure to take advantage of modern features, like remotely accessible voicemail and caller ID, as well as call forwarding and routing, and has just completed the migration in three of its UK offices.

Dave Butler, Puma IT manager told IT PRO that the incumbent telephone system was antiquated, difficult and expensive to maintain and stood completely outside of Puma UK's existing IT environment. He said call routing was virtually impossible, meaning the company risked missing important calls from retailer customers at busy times.

"We looked at upgrading the BT Meridien system and found it would cost too much to add each new bit of functionality we wanted," he said. "Also, we decided that a 'pure' IP telephony solution was the only way forward as we could then treat voice as just another 'standard' business application that could be integrated into our existing network environment and for basic moves and changes could be supported in-house."

Puma chose to deploy IP telephony systems from provider Swyx, whose partner NGC Networks supported the direct integration of the system into Puma's existing IT environment and connected its three UK operations together onto a single network.

The SwyxWare system installation has just been completed at all of Puma's offices and is interconnected via the company's intranet. This has enabled Puma to consolidate its two previous receptions to a single facility at Batley, from where all calls are routed.

Puma expects to benefit from a mid-to-long term return on investment, as well as free calls between all offices, quick provisioning of new services and phones and the ability for staff such as sales personnel to 'hotdesk', regardless of the office they are working from or to work remotely.

Butler said: "As well as saving us money, our new IP system will allow us to give value-added customer service, where callers like important retailers can always find someone to speak to using the call forwarding and routing facilities."

He added that Puma would look to integrate the IP system further with its existing applications, so "a customer's records will appear on-screen when they call," for example. The company has already integrated its instance of Lotus Notes email.

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