Background

A huge New Zealand success story, Orion Health specialises in workflow and integration technology for the global healthcare sector. Headquartered in Auckland, the company has bases in Wellington, Sydney, Santa Monica, Edmonton, Boston, Palma (Spain) and Reading (UK). The company also works with a network of technology partners including Cisco, IBM, Initiate and Oracle Corporation. Likely to become a $1billion enterprise by 2010, Orion Health is emerging as a global leader in healthcare and technology.

Effective communication with clients, partners and between bases is a mission-critical requirement for Orion Health. However the company's incumbent Alcatel proprietary system wasn't living up to expectations. Problems included unsatisfactory VOIP quality, high ongoing fees for service and maintenance, and drop-outs in the link between Orion's Edmonton and Santa Monica offices. "Just before we opened our newest office in Boston, we realised that we had to change to full VOIP or pour more money into the telephony system we already had - however with the existing system each handset that we added on was costing us $1500 in hardware and licenses", said Paul Cunningham, telecommunications specialist at Orion Health. "We came to the conclusion that proprietary systems are a dead-end path because you're locked into one company and one solution. We decided to broaden our scope to pure VOIP systems."

Consequently Orion Health investigated Asterisk-based telephony. Of all the systems they evaluated, which included a proposal from Cisco, the Trixbox Pro IP phone system put forward by Hitech Solutions stood out for its stability, user-friendly interface, superior toolset, lifetime licensing and superior engineering support. What's more, Orion recognised that Trixbox's open standards kept doors open. "If we didn't like the system for any reason in the future, the servers and phones could be re-deployed. Whereas if we went with another proprietary system, we'd have to throw it all away to change in the future", said Paul.

 

Implementation

Led by Danny Tomsett, the Hitech Solutions team collaborated with Orion Health's IT people to implement the hybrid-hosted Trixbox Pro IP phone system. While Hitech Solutions focused on getting the Trixbox server up and running in Auckland (which took only a day), Orion Health's IT people installed more than 100 handsets and 50 soft phones themselves.  Following a month's trial in Auckland, the Trixbox solution was successfully rolled out to Orion Health's overseas offices.

 

User Experience

Recently Orion Health took a photograph of the Auckland Trixbox's uptime status reading, which showed that the first year of service had absolutely no interruptions - 100% reliability.  In Paul Cunningham's words, the new solution is "really good - there are no issues with operations, and no downtime to get nervous about." He also rates Hitech Solution's support people highly, saying that little issues during the settling in phase were solved without any impact on Orion's business.

Orion is now looking forward to audio conferencing through Trixbox and their IT people are working with Hitech Solutions' development team to make this happen. Audio conferencing currently costs Orion about $20,000 a month, so the savings are expected to be significant.

 

Highlights:

• Compared to upgrading the incumbent proprietary system, the cost of moving to Trixbox through Hitech Solutions saved Orion Health more than $100,000.
• A phone number in another country can be connected to Orion's phone system. For instance, a customer in Egypt can be provided with the equivalent of an 0800 number and Orion Health is charged at whatever their local 0800 rate is, which translates into significant savings.
• In the USA, where up to 70% of Orion's workforce is routinely out-of-office on sales calls, employees can now receive an extension call anywhere at any time. Hotel calling costs have been eliminated.
• Previously, the prohibitive costs of hardware and cabling meant that not everyone at Orion Health's headquarters had an extension; sometimes one extension was shared between as many as six users. With Trixbox, everyone has either a physical or a soft phone (through their PC). In addition, desks can be moved within the office without having to manually move phones.