Providence Italy

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to adopt the latest technology to increase productivity and to stay current. Though this notion is very attractive, the actual migration or upgrade of systems can be expensive and comes with the risk of slowing down or halting business if the migration does not go well. The risk is even higher when there are many inherited devices or equipment from the old system. The new system has to be versatile enough to allow successful migration.

Providence Italy, a Havas Group Company, displayed such challenges in their upgrade of a telephone system. They owned four different brands of PBXs, as well as various SIP phones that were connected to each PBX. They wanted to continue using the SIP phones to minimize cost, but also to avoid the confusion of system migration between employees and to retain the existing usability of their phone system. As Brekeke’s products support standard protocol and not proprietary protocol, the new system with Brekeke PBX allows their employees to continue using the phones that they are familiar with while building one solid system for the company.

Overview:

Client: Providence Italy, a Havas Group Company (https://it.providenceitalia.it/)
Location: Milan and Rome, Italy
Product: Brekeke PBX
Number of sites: Headquarters in Milan with 544 extensions and a division of Providence Italy in Rome with 19 extensions

Providence Italy is a division of Havas Media in Italy and part of the global marketing and communications group Havas. Operating mainly in Western Europe and the Americas, it is the 9th largest media specialist worldwide. Havas Media won AdWeek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year award in 2016.

Challenge:

Providence Italy had four different brands of PBXs: SELTA, Samsung, Alcatel, and Free PBX. To unify communications within the company and also minimize the administrative cost, they needed a system that could provide a solid, reliable telephony system that allowed them to reuse their existing devices: several hundred Yealink phones, Aastra phones, Snom phones, Polycom’s conference device, Grandstream, Linksys SPA, and so on. With this upgrade of telephony system, their specific requirements were listed as ability to host the service in the cloud, flexibility for custom engineering work to meet their unique requirements, mobile conversions, and VoIP Fax capability.

Solution:

Brekeke PBX was installed in the cloud with Windows Server 2012. This allows the administrator to access the server at any time from any where. Employees are able to access their user login system from any location, and be connected on the same extension system that allows instant and cost-effective communication between employees. Another advantage of having the system in the cloud is that the receptionist located in the headquarters office in Milan can assist customers who are visiting their Rome office via IP intercom and video system. This minimizes the cost of hiring an additional receptionist at the Rome office, and the customers experience the same high-quality customer service as they would if they visited the headquarters office. Biesse Sistemi s.r.l., local partner of Brekeke in Italy, developed custom applications for Providence Italy: VoIP Fax system and operator console system.

VoIP Fax server solution integrated with Brekeke PBX:

• Web interface in order to send a fax
• Different formats available for sending fax (pdf, doc, xls, ppt, txt)
• Fax server manages 153 users

Custom operator console system integrated with Brekeke PBX:

• Developed operator console using Brekeke’s developer tool, Brekeke PAL WebSocket
• Display status of all extensions in real time
• Allow managing call queue via console screen
• Allow call transfer to other extensions via console screen
• Login/logout from the “Reception PO” group
• Receptionist will receive popup screen with customer information that is connected to CRM contact list in their database

Result and Benefits:

Using Brekeke PBX, Providence Italy was able to reuse all hardware from the old telephony system they owned. They were able to realize significant economic savings by terminating all maintenance contracts from the four different PBX vendors. Having one telephony system located in the cloud, the HR department can now control and manage all employees for adding and deleting employees and extensions. Also, instead of relying on a third-party consultant to manage and administer different PBX systems, the IT group within the organization was able to learn Brekeke PBX and manage all PBX functionalities. Overall, Providence Italy was able to adopt new technology and at the same time eliminate all unnecessary cost derived from having multiple PBX systems.