Getting a handle on telephony

Mindset Network is an NGO broadcaster that creates, sources and delivers educational resources through its own satellite technology. Content is delivered to schools, the health community, vocation and enterprise community as well as underdeveloped communities.

The company moved into its own offices in Randburg in June 2007, having shared offices with Liberty, in Braamfontein, for the first five years of its existence. "We got the good news that we had purchased our own building in Randburg, and had to start from scratch purchasing all the infrastructure we required," says Mindset IT manager Johan Els.

"We sent out a request for information to any supplier we could find online. They all came back with proposals. We went through a review board on the proposals and decided on a VOIP solution because integration into our current systems, and the flexibility of the solution, meant we had to opt for it.

"Due to the nature of the work, we move staff around the office a lot," he says. "With a VOIP phone, you can pick up, plug in at a different point and continue working as normal. This is very useful. We also have freelancers and people who work from home. The fact that they can keep working over a traditional broadband connection was also a good motivator."

Mindset started hunting for solutions in March last year, made the decision in April and started preparing the new building in May. "We moved staff over in mid-June," says Els. "Most of the infrastructure was in place by then."

Mindset started off with 80 users on the VOIP solution and now has approximately 90 phones configured, some of which are used by freelancers as and when they are in the building.

The VOIP solution was supplied by OpenVoice, a local company that focuses on the design, delivery and implementation of converged telecommunications solutions via open source platforms.

Says OpenVoice CTO Clayton Hayward: "Mindset is a very good example of an ideal customer for IP telephony, because it has strong in-house technical skills. We very much rate the success of an installation by the number of support calls we get. When customers have a strong IP support desk inside, they can deploy IP and it will be a success. If they don't, the converse is true. IPT puts a huge load on any existing network.

"Mindset's solution was a very big deployment, which had complex billing requirements (there are two companies running out of one building). The whole installation was run very smoothly. We had two or three weeks of bedding the solution down, but have almost not heard from [Mindset] again," Hayward notes.

Says Els: "The implementation from the PABX supplier and [of the] hardware was smooth and went very well. The telco supplier was an issue, however. It delivered late, the line wasn't right, we had problems with the billing information; there were a lot of issues there. Otherwise, things were very smooth for the vast number of handset roll-outs. Everybody was impressed that we could make calls on 18 June [the delivery date] when we moved in."

Since the implementation, says Els, support has been very good. "Being an NGO, we couldn't go for the platinum option, but within the support package we have chosen, support is delivered on time. We get what we need," he states.

Everybody was impressed that we could make calls.

Johan Els, IT manager, Mindset

While Els says it is difficult to gauge exactly how much of a saving the company has seen, since it did not pay a separate telephone bill at its old premises, he does say that since implementing and fine-tuning the real-time billing, Mindset has seen a decrease in running costs of between 10% and 15%.

"Real-time billing means we can pick up misuse and inappropriate use very quickly and manage it before it gets out of hand," he notes.

"We are exploring moving the whole exco (six people) to home offices, with a view to implementing early this year. The exco will connect via broadband from home and be able to work as if they were in the office. We are also still writing our own reports out of the billing system to monitor use and misuse [one of the benefits of open source solutions is that this is do-able]. Because our bill is not high enough, we didn't implement least cost routing."

This, he says, is being looked into and implementation will be considered with the existing system as it may reduce costs even further.