IP telephony and data player Avaya today announced it has signed a US$1 million contract to deploy integrated voice and data solutions for Cochlear, replacing previous vendors Cisco and Alcatel at the hearing giant’s head office in North Ryde.
Cochlear manufactures implantable hearing solutions and has a global team of 2,000 people. The company will soon be headquartered at Macquarie University, after a recent decision to consolidate its two Sydney offices into a new global head office. Moving to Macquarie, Cochlear will centralise its manufacturing, logistics, research and quality divisions alongside its corporate offices; this will result in 1000 staff members being connected to Avaya’s voice and data solutions.
Cochlear is believed to have previously been using Cisco for its data networking needs and Alcatel on the voice side. According to a media release issued today by Avaya, Cochlear was looking for reliable solution to avoid the occasional outages it had experienced on its previous system.
Cochlear global communications security & projects manager, Craig Davies, confirmed his company was not satisfied with its previous multi-vendor switches. “Our infrastructure at our previous sites was a mixture of different vendor switches running [the Spanning Tree network protocol],” said Davies. We faced a number of outages and needed a more reliable network.
For Cochlear, Avaya partner NSC will implement a single-vendor solution which Cochlear said would improve uptime, enhance security and deliver energy efficiency savings, but also contribute to improve employees’ productivity. Cochlear Asia Pacific president Mark Salmon said his company was looking for a solution to simplify communications and cater for future developments.
“Our employees need a communications system that lets them get on with their job in a simple, efficient and above all reliable environment,” he said. “Ultimately, Avaya’s Unified Communications will not only help us to integrate and simplify our communications infrastructure at our new Sydney offices but also allow us to cater for future global deployments.”
Davies said NSC had been selected based on its Avaya solution combined with its experience. Through the US$1 million deal, NSC will deploy the Avay aSplit Multi-link Trunking (SMLT) solution to deliver network resiliency, togther with more than 3600 wireless handsets, over 9600 IP handsets, the relevant software and Avaya Ethernet Routing switches including the ERS4500 Series, ERS5650, and ERS8394.
NSC chief Craig Neil said NSC was satisfied to have been chosen by Cochlear. “We are very honoured to have been selected by Cochlear for this important project,” he said. “It is particularly pleasing to have been awarded both the voice and the data contracts as these were separate tenders – both of which were hotly contested.”
I’m glad I read this, and didn’t rely on the headline – I had to stop and think for a moment exactly when Cisco or Alcatel ever made Cochlear implants.
Must be late or something…*head+desk*
Is there still a company called Alcatel? Shouldn’t that be Alcatel-Lucent?
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