HP will deploy more than 1700 ShoreTel IP telephony handsets across more than 60 Salvation Army sites in Australia.
The deal follows HP South Pacific's signing as a Shoretel champion partner program member in May, which sees HP itself providing solutions across ShoreTel's entire product suite, including technical architecture, consulting, outsourcing and support services.
At the time, HP noted that there was growing demand for sophisticated unified communications and contact centre solutions in the region, with the partnership expected to enable ShoreTel to increase its footprint in the market.
The Salvation Army's existing hosted IP telephony contract expired in 2014, prompting the Salvation Army to release a tender for a unified communications and contact centre solution, integrating IBM Notes.
HP has designed a hardware/software hybrid solution for The Salvation Army, based on ShoreTel unified communications, enterprise contract centre and mobility products.
The core of the UC system is virtualised and is in an active/active dual data center deployment, with one data center in Sydney and the other in Brisbane. All other sites that require resiliency – for example, aged care – have physical ShoreTel appliances.
The Salvation Army's existing underlying network is an HP Networking Core with POE switching for all telephony connectivity.
Recent findings from research firm Telsyte identified a significant spike in mid-market demand for unified communications.
The Australian Enterprise Communications Market Study 2015 says while 90% of Australian businesses in the mid-market have not yet deployed unified communications, 32% plan to this year.
Rodney Gedda, Telsyte senior analyst, says the mid-market has been underserved with fully featured UC solutions that are scalable and easy to deploy.
“Without the burden of a complex enterprise architecture, mid-market CIOs have an opportunity to modernise legacy voice-only systems to deliver voice, video and messaging on the one platform with a view to adding in other applications including call centres,” Gedda says.