Australian Bureau of Statistics ditches Cisco for Skype

As part of its transformation project, the Australian Bureau of Statistics is looking for a provider to move its telephony environment to Skype for Business.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has published a tender (RFT), in which it requests presentations for the migration of its Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) telephony environment to Skype for Business Enterprise Voice.

ABS is in the process of redefining its business processes as part of a departmental level transformation program whose objective is to change the way information and statistics are collected, managed and delivered.

According to ABS, the transformation will involve "reengineering ABS business processes", as well as investment in services for the entire company and basic basic infrastructure, which ABS expects will result in "reusable functionality" in multiple commercial activities .

The future state of "ABS" will be designed to be business-driven, assisted by information and technology, and operationally aligned, "says the RFT.

At the same time, ABS is implementing flexible work arrangements and work based on activities in all offices.

"This project will change the way people work and strong, feature-rich collaboration solutions will be a key factor for success," ABS wrote.

Currently, ABS depends to a large extent on multiple communications services in the Unified Communications space, however, as flexible work arrangements are implemented, ABS wants to simplify and modernize its stack.

"As [flexible work arrangements and activity-based work] are implemented in ABS, these services will become increasingly important to allow staff working remotely with their colleagues to participate and collaborate," says the RFT.

ABS wants field staff and those working in any of its offices to have full access to ABS CRM, as well as the ability of all employees to make and receive calls from a virtual Windows environment NextGen Desktop and mobile devices, independently of your location.

The 400 field officers currently use laptops with Windows 7 Enterprise.

ABS currently uses CUCM to provide all telephony services and Skype for Business provides instant messaging and presence; Desktop video conferencing is also done through Skype to Skype meetings and the integration of Polycom into virtual meeting rooms; while IPFX Unified Contact Center is used to manage the internal support processes and facilitate the commitment with companies and citizens.

As part of the ABS transformation program, Pega 7 is being implemented as a CRM solution and work assignment. The RFT explains that the Confirmit Horizons integrates with Pega to provide online forms used to collect the survey responses.

"As these services are currently provided through multiple vendor solutions, ABS now seeks to simplify, unify and modernize their communications, contact centers and telephone stack," explains the agency.

According to the tender, the main elements of this strategy will include the migration of basic telephony services from CUCM to Skype for Business Enterprise Voice and the replacement of IPFX with a more "feature-rich" contact center solution that is compatible and integrates with Skype EV and Pega 7.

As part of the ABS transformation program, a new server infrastructure environment - Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) - has been implemented to finally host all local platforms.

"The objective of this project is to improve the security, flexibility and maintenance of the ABS server infrastructure," said ABS.

The existing Skype for Business servers are hosted on legacy infrastructure and it would be expected that any local rebuild of Skype for Business and associated Exchange servers would be in NGI.

The NGI environment is "heavily fire protected" and uses VMware vRealize Automation to automate deployments and VMWare NSX for virtualized networks.

"The proposals must identify the pros and cons of the various platform configurations that can make up the solution, that is, cloud, hybrid, on the site or another," says the RFT. "If an implementation in the cloud can not be made at this time, the bidder can delineate a roadmap to the cloud."

The current ABS environment is located in the facilities of the Canberra Data Center (CDC) in Hume.

Although ABS has had a tumultuous relationship with IBM in the past 18 months, the agency said that because it is a "long-term, extensive user" of Lotus Domino, and that IBM Notes is used as its mail and calendar client, it has no Current plans to get away from Notes / Domino by mail.

"Although this is a frequent complication when the integration of the system with solutions from non-IBM suppliers is carried out," ABS added.

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