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Flemish water supply company VMW chooses NextiraOne as its new communications partner
September 2010 by Marc Jacob
Flemish water supply company VMW, which supplies water to around 2.6 million people in Flanders, has signed a company-wide deal with NextiraOne, Europe’s leading communications experts. This is a three-year contract with possible extensions of up to a further six years. NextiraOne will supply VMW with technology and services for its contact centre, data network, IP telephony system and services. NextiraOne will utilise technology from Alcatel-Lucent to carry out the work.
VMW is the most important supplier of drinking water in Flanders. The organisation encompasses 80 production centres, 18 local service centres, four regional offices and a Brussels head office. With its head office due to relocate at the end of this year, VMW wanted to find a partner that could over its ICT management and replace and standardise its existing solutions, including the vital addition of a professional contact centre.
“Six companies submitted proposals for this project earlier this year,” says Jan Hammenecker, VMW’s Director of Business Systems and Communications. “It was already clear at the negotiation stage that NextiraOne stood out from the other candidates thanks to their impressive analysis of our needs, including our contact centre requirements. The company’s knowledge in the telephony field and their relationship with the vendor Genesys/Alcatel-Lucent also played an important role in our choice. It is also important to us that NextiraOne is our sole contact point, and that they take prime responsibility for the success of the project. A further deciding factor was NextiraOne’s Network Operating Centre (NOC) which they will use to continually monitor our own network.”
“The impending relocation of VMW’s head office will give the company the ideal opportunity to outsource its network management and to standardise its solutions across its widespread locations,” says Ingrid De Latte, NextiraOne’s Managing Director for the Benelux. “The first challenge for NextiraOne will be to get all aspects of the data network, the contact centre, the IP telephony system and the services operational before the head office is relocated. From next year onwards, we can begin to implement the Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent solutions in the regional offices. After that, there will be a further roll-out to the other networks and VMW’s switchboards,” adds Ingrid De Latte.
NextiraOne is Europe’s leading expert in communications services and has a direct sales and service presence in 17 countries, serving more than 60,000 customers. The company designs, installs, maintains and supports sustainable solutions to meet the communications needs of its customers - from voice, data and video to mobility, security and applications. Working with the world’s leading technology companies, NextiraOne provides end-to-end sustainable communications solutions to deliver measurable business benefits to its customers. The company counts many public utilities amongst its customers and has recently implemented a €3.5M Contact Centre and IP Telephony solution for Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, providing enhanced customer service for its Billing and Operations divisions which handle over 1.2 million calls each year.
