WELLINGTON, New Zealand - 22 June 2005 - New Zealand Post, one of New Zealand's largest enterprises, has deployed core networking infrastructure and Internet Protocol (IP) Communications technology from Cisco Systems® to improve the efficiency of its growing mail operations, to reduce costs and to help enable the growth of its banking business.

New Zealand Post has a wide range of capabilities, including marketing and personal communications, document and information management, the distribution of physical goods, and banking and payments. New Zealand Post employs more than 9000 staff and had an annual turnover of more than NZ$1 billion in the financial year 2003/2004.

New Zealand Post Chief Information Officer Nigel Prince said; "We wanted to evolve our communications network to cater for the growth we are experiencing across the company, including in our banking business. We worked with Cisco® and Datacom to take full advantage of the benefits converged networking offers. This has enabled us to substantially improve capabilities and, ultimately, to deliver an even better service to our customers."

Mr Prince said the primary challenge was that much of New Zealand Post's infrastructure, such as its aging private branch exchanges (PBXs), needed to be replaced because they were out of date and no longer capable of meeting the organisation's needs.

New Zealand Post, Cisco and Datacom developed a solution based on the replacement of separate voice and data networks with one IP-based network, which is capable of delivering voice, video and data. The IP telephony system is expected to generate at least $NZ2million in operational savings over the next five years, partly by reducing the costs of managing moves, additions and changes within the company.

The project featured an upgrade of New Zealand Post's local-area network (LAN) and wide-area network (WAN) facilities, covering 40 locations across New Zealand. Cisco Catalyst® 3550 Series switches are deployed at New Zealand Post sites.

The new, converged network replaces 30 PBXs with Cisco CallManager call-processing software, supporting approximately 3000 Cisco 7912, 7940 and 7960 series IP phones across the national network. The upgrade also includes Cisco Unity^TM messaging and PIX® firewalls.

New Zealand Post had previously migrated its national call centre operations onto a converged Cisco IP Contact Centre (IPCC) platform, to service the needs of its New Zealand Post and Kiwibank operations.

The contact centre platform uses servers for application integration, interactive voice response (IVR) and customer-located IP-IVR servers. This hardware, and remote access for managing 0800 plans and for supervision of call centre operations including queue length tracking, will help enable 0800 calls to be handled by the WAN. New Zealand Post is also able to make considerable savings, in the vicinity of tens of thousands of dollars a month, on 0800 charges. It does this by routing the calls from Kiwibank customers who live Auckland through its network to its Wellington contact centre. Other regions will be added.

Cisco New Zealand Country Manager, David Barker, said; "Cisco's vision sees a major transition from today's networks, which are primarily focused on transporting bits, to an Intelligent Information Network that connects users to the applications and services they need or want. New Zealand Post is already reaping the benefits of its new network and there will be more to come."

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