Avaya CS1000 Migration

Overview

Our case study begins with a medium sized Hospital in south-western Ontario that comprises a main Hospital location, a smaller satellite site and several offsite clinics. The Hospital supports over 650 beds and over 3,700 staff.
The Hospital needed to replace their aging Avaya Communication Server 1000 infrastructure; flat funding compounded by a growing and aging patient population made both capital and operating budget very difficult to obtain for a full system replacement. This is where our multi-phased migration strategy that was tailored to fit the Hospital’s budget constraints became the key to allowing the Hospital to start addressing the aging system.

Current Environment

The existing voice solution (please see Figure 1 below) comprised of an Avaya CS 1000 PBX with CallPilot and Avaya Aura Contact Center at the main Hospital, and an Avaya CS 1000E PBX at the satellite site that leveraged the CallPilot at the main site for voicemail. Small offsite clinics utilized small standalone key systems that were not connected to the main Hospital system. The Hospital was looking to Eclipse, as their trusted advisor, to propose a migration to a modern Unified Communications solution that would address some key deficiencies:
– CallPilot software and hardware no longer supported by the manufacturer
– Security issues related to Win 2003, which Call Pilot was running on
– CS1000 equipment end of sale and no software support after April 2019 (for CS 1000 rls 6.0)
– CS1000M no longer supported hardware – used/refurbished replacement only available via grey market
– Investment required on satellite CS1000E to integrate to alternative solution
– Existing wireless telephony solution is no longer supported
– No budget to replace entire voicemail and telephone system
– Expected increases in maintenance costs as a result of EOS
– The Hospital needed a long-term strategy for not only voicemail but also the telephone system

Figure 1 – Existing Solution

The proposed solution broke the system migration into logical phases that would align with budget availability over multiple budget cycles, starting with a de-risk phase that would replace the most high-risk equipment and telephony services for the Hospital. Our chosen vendor for the migration was Cisco and the platform was an on-premise Unified Communications Manager (UCM) system. We chose Cisco as the preferred vendor for this transition due to a variety of factors:
– Seamless calling integration between the existing CS 1000 systems and Cisco UCM
– No upgrades were required on the existing CS 1000 systems to enable dial-plan integration with Cisco UCM, nothing proposed would be considered “throw-away” technology
– Eclipse is an industry-trusted integrator of Cisco UCM technology and has a long heritage of Avaya/Nortel CS 1000 sales and service – we manage both systems including all integrations
– Once phase 1 was completed the base Cisco UCM system was in place to facilitate future migration strategies
– By de-risking the CS 1000 system in phase 1 the Hospital was able to start shifting manufacturer support budget on the CS 1000 systems to system migration activities
Equipment and licensing related to the case study:
– Cisco Flex 3 user licensing
– 2 x Cisco Unified Computing System servers (one per data centre)
– 2 x Cisco Integrated Services Routers with Cisco Unified Border Element licensing for support of Service Provider SIP trunks
– Cisco IP Telephones

Migration – Phase I
Phase I of the system migration addressed high-risk equipment (please see Figure 2 below):
– Core Cisco UCM system installation
– Installation of high-availability services for redundancy
– Voicemail migration to move all voicemail and auto attendant services from CallPilot to Cisco Unity Connection voicemail

Figure 2 – Phase I

Migration – Phase II

Phase 2 of the system migration consisted of further de-risking the CS 1000 system (please see Figure 3 below):
– Migrate the PRI service off the CS 1000 system to SIP trunking connected to Cisco UCM
– Contact Center migration to Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express
– Migrate high-priority stations within the Hospital to Cisco IP phones

Figure 3 – Phase II

Migration – Phase III

Phase 3 of the system migration consisted of (please see Figure 4 below):
– Migrating users at the satellite site and off-site clinic locations
– Relocating redundant services from the main Hospital data centre to the larger satellite site data centre creating a Geographically Redundant system
– Installation of additional redundant gear and SIP PSTN redundancy
– Select user migrations to Cisco IP Phones

Figure 4 – Phase III

Migration – Phase IV

Phase 4 of the system migration consisted of (please see Figure 5 below):
– Remaining user migrations to Cisco IP Phones
– Migration of wireless telephones and pagers to Cisco Wireless IP stations
– Installation of Cisco Expressway and implementation of Cisco Jabber for VPN-free secure connectivity from PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices for Softphone and Instant Messaging