Enhancing the business with Swyx
Red Commerce previously used a traditional TDM-based PBX (Siemens HiPath). However as the business grew the limitations of the system became more apparent, the biggest problems being its rigidity and its inability to expand to meet the new demands of the business. IT manager at Red Commerce, Ben Carter explains the problem, "As a straight-forward telephone system our incumbent solution was fantastic, we had no real complaints. As the size of our operation increased though, we needed a communications solution that could integrate directly into our existing and future business processes and expand exponentially as new users came on-board without the continual need to add new hardware".
Carter continues, "For example in order to maximise the efficiency of our consultants' time we developed a sophisticated database of all our call records so that we could analyse the areas of our business that were most lucrative. For this to work the telephone system needed to export CDRs (call detail records)in real time to our CRM system – unfortunately this was beyond the capabilities of our existing PBX. In addition, the system required new hardware each time we wanted to add new users and very quickly we reached its capacity – it was at this point we realised we needed to upgrade!"
The company then wrote a detailed specification of what was required and undertook a thorough investigation of the products and technology that were available on the market. Carter describes the procurement process, "We looked at everything that was available including some impressive offerings from both Cisco and Avaya. However in every case a high level of product development was required to meet our needs, the one exception was the solution proposed by Atia Solutions, a 'pure' software based IP PBX from Swyx".