News Release

Swiss Canton of Vaud Moves to IP Telephony With Cisco AVVID

Completion of Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data Roll Out using Cisco Technology Brings Cost Savings and Efficiency Gains to 25,000 Local Government Employees
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Sep 27, 2002

LAUSANNE, Switzerland - September 27, 2002 - Cisco Systems today announced that the Lake Geneva region's largest employer, the administration of the Canton of Vaud, is rolling out a Cisco-based IP telephony system to bring substantial cost savings and efficiency gains to the 25,000 employees spread over 450 local offices.

The Cantonal Center of Telecommunications (CCT) estimates that each government employee spends at least an hour a day on the phone, a total of 340 million minutes of use a year. As such, in 1988, CCT began looking at ways of replacing its 10-year-old private branch exchange (PBX) technology with a new platform that would provide a long-lasting return on investment, be easier to maintain and control as well as cut costs.

"Only a comprehensive architecture unifying voice and data could deliver the results we needed," said Andr Bourget, head of the CCT. "The IP Telephony solution needed to deliver better and faster communications platform reaching across all areas of the organization, and as such enable more service-orientated working practices. Cisco AVVID has provided the means to meet all these requirements."

AVVID is Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data. It lies at the heart of the Canton of Vaud's new IP telephony system, which also includes Cisco's 3600 and 7200 series routers as voice gateways and six software-based Cisco Call Managers (replacing 232 classic PBXs). Around 2,600 IP phones have also been ordered to date and more than 1,000 are already installed, although this figure is expected to rise to more than 12,000 by the time the changeover is completed, in 2005. In addition Cisco Unity and Cisco's IP Call Center solutions will be deployed to enable a more comprehensive solution for customer relationship and workforce optimization needs.

"The Canton of Vaud tested AVVID at the Engineering School of Yverdon renowned telecom labs, prior to deployment, and decided the technology was ideal for their requirements. Its flexibility was also tested in a real-life scenario, in May 2002, when the historic Parliament building in Lausanne burnt down and 30 employees had to be relocated from the Canton's Information Service. In spite of this, Full telephone and data access was again available in less than two days - something that would have been impossible with a traditional PBX." Explained Andr Bourget

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