OfficeMax, one of the world’s largest office product supply companies with a major B2B presence in the Australian market, has deployed a new unified communications network from Nortel with the intention of cutting costs, improving its environmental credentials, and taking its customer service standards to the next level.

OfficeMax decided to create a consolidated voice and data network platform for its operational centres across Australia and New Zealand, and chose Nortel because of its heritage in voice communications and its track record in data networking. It also wanted to consolidate its disparate customer service centres into a centralised contact centre for Australia.

The company expects to save substantial costs by running its regional communications in both Australia and New Zealand across a wide-area IP network. The new network will also give more than 2,000 staff in the region access to advanced communications functionality – such as presence, unified messaging, click-to-call conferencing and follow-me number portability – which they didn't have before.

“The decision to build a new network was prompted by two major factors: the relocation of our data centre and staff in New Zealand into new premises, and the consolidation of our contact centres in Australia,” says Mark Window, National Infrastructure Manager, OfficeMax Australia.

"We wanted to take the opportunity to create new synergies between our operations in both countries, and with staff constantly on the move, we needed a solution that would fit our highly mobile environment,” says Window.

“Fortunately we found in Nortel a company that could service us on all fronts: from its energy-efficient networking solutions for the data centre that matched our own environmental goals, its proven voice technology, its alliance with our primary software provider (Microsoft), and its respected contact centre and unified messaging solutions.”

Nortel’s solution for OfficeMax includes the flagship Communication Server (CS) 1000 Unified Communications Platform, Call Pilot unified messaging and Nortel Multimedia Conferencing in the core with Survivable Remote Gateways at the branch locations. Nortel 1120E and 1140E Gigabit IP Phones, Nortel 2033 IP Conferencing phones, and Nortel IP Softphone 2050 for PC-based communications.

Nortel Contact Centre 6.0 with Call Recording and Quality Monitoring and Contact Centre specific 1150E IP Phones handle all customer interaction, while all voice and data traffic is securely transmitted on a highly resilient Nortel Ethernet Switch (ERS) Network.

OfficeMax is currently trialling the next phase of its network deployment, the migration to Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) unified communications platform. Since 2006 Nortel and Microsoft have a strategic alliance to integrate their communications hardware and software platforms respectively.