The Agency Group - Upgrading to Avaya IP Office

Narrator: The Agency Group, one of the world’s top talent agencies’s recently upgraded from a Nortel System to Avaya IP Office preserving a significant portion of its original Nortel investment while enhancing its communications around the world. Howie Gold: We’re artist representatives. We’re responsible for taking an artist that might be up and coming or developing their skills and guiding them through the music business. Nickelback is one of the larger Canadian acts that we represent; The Black Keys out of the U.S., Pink Floyd, Alexisonfire, Metric, the list goes on and on. We’ve been a Nortel house since our company started. They used to say in Canada, nobody ever got fired for buying Nortel. Avaya had integrated into their new system the ability to hook-up Nortel hardware to an Avaya IP Office System and to us that was a huge plus because roughly 50 percent of your investment is gonna be in the hardware and for phones. We have to stay connected, with our clients, with the artists that we deal with, that’s where our phone systems really come into play.Narrator: Avaya IP Office offers a range of productivity solutions for specific users. The Agency Group chose Power User to keep on-the-go executives connected and productive.Howie Gold: With the IP Office, we have software that we install on our agents laptops called softphone and as long as they have access to Wi-Fi, they can stay connected by making phone calls, receiving phone calls. We had one of our executives spend two weeks in China; he was using his softphone the entire time. When he checked out of the hotel, all the other people he was traveling with had long distance charges of $3,000-$4,000 on their hotel bill. He had zero because the entire time he’s using his Softphone. The IP Office from Avaya has a 128 party conference bridge so it gives us the ability to hold our internal and external calls that have 20- or 25 people and essentially do it at no cost to us.Narrator: The Agency Group now has Avaya IP Office in Toronto and its headquarters in London and Nortel Systems at its offices in Los Angeles and Malmo, Sweden.Howie Gold: And we’re able to continually communicate with the other offices using a four-digit extension. Avaya IP Office is giving us the ability to save money on toll calls overseas; conference calling, interoffice calls and we’re able to retain our T-series sets from Nortel. We actually planned to do some training but it wasn’t necessary. So when you factor in all the savings, it could be $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 dollars. I had some concerns about our staff’s ability to learn a new phone system. The Avaya people assured us that they had taken all the steps necessary to integrate Nortel functionality into the IP Office System and they were true to their work. All my concerns were unfounded; everything was installed perfectly, ran perfectly and continues to run perfectly.