Siemens

The City of Gulfport, Florida, strives to foster a positive quality of life for its nearly 13,000 residents, but the aging communications system in city buildings was negatively impacting the service it provided to citizens. Knowing that it needed to upgrade its 10-year old Centrex system, the City of Gulfport decided to work with Siemens Communications, Inc. and Communications System Management (CSM) to deploy a new IP-based unified communications system across all of the city offices. The City of Gulfport needed a more reliable and flexible communications solution, but also hoped to realize some cost savings with a new solution. “In addition to the considerable expense we were facing to upgrade our legacy Centrex system, we were unhappy with the ongoing costs associated with the system,” said Sam Rivera, IT Director for the City of Gulfport.

“Once we started looking at VoIP solutions, we realized we could get a lot more for our money.” After exploring solutions from a number of vendors, the City of Gulfport decided to deploy a Siemens(R) HiPath(R) 3800 IP solution with support from CSM. The solution provided the city with the cost savings it wanted — projected at about $100,000 over 10 years — but also offered a rich feature set in an easy to use package.

“Our previous solution was just not working anymore — even simple changes or moves took weeks to make; for years, the message waiting lights on all of our phones hadn’t worked; and simple things like programming frequently called numbers was just not possible,” said Rivera.