Township of Middletown, N.J. Achieves More Than Fifty Percent Boost in Response Times and Productivity With High-Performance, Reliable Network and Integrated IP Telephony

Extreme Networks, Inc.and Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services, today announced that the Township of Middletown, New Jersey, with the help of Avaya Platinum BusinessPartner Empire Technologies, has deployed converged network and IP telephony solutions that allow it to increase consistency of communications, response times and productivity by more than fifty percent.

Middletown, which has a population of about 67,000, is located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Many of the Township’s municipal buildings, including its main administration building, the department of public works, three parks department buildings, and the Johnson Gill annex, were already networked together. When it implemented IP telephony from Avaya, Middletown also upgraded its network to support its requirements for data, VoIP and related unified communications, and to attain the transmission speed and reliability required for the new, high-performance applications.

"In building a new convergence infrastructure and supporting communications applications, our primary concerns were seamless integration, performance and having a strong relationship and understanding with our vendors" said Todd Costello, IT manager for the Township of Middletown. "With Avaya, Extreme Networks® and Empire Technologies, we satisfied this need. In terms of productivity and response time, we are seeing a 50-75 percent improvement in our staff’s response time to vendor calls and inquiries from residents. That adds up, and definitely affects the bottom line in a positive way"

The Township had to support video surveillance, VoIP for phones and traditional applications and its IT staff spent time at the Avaya interoperability lab. After experiencing Extreme Networks and Avaya converged solutions in action, working with it, and realizing the depth of integration for a complete converged network solution, the choice became clear.

"Middletown represents a terrific example of how Extreme Networks and Avaya provide a network foundation and feature-rich communication solutions that positively impact the daily operations for our government customers" said Paul Hooper, chief marketing officer for Extreme Networks. "This results in a dependable converged system able to support their mission critical applications while delivering higher value and greater productivity for employees"

Empire Technologies, which specializes in supporting the integration of advanced voice, video and data, was chosen to bring it all together. "After learning more about what the Township wanted to accomplish, we thought an Extreme data solution was the perfect answer and the Middletown Township team agreed" said Cordell Toson, president and CEO for Empire Technologies.

"To serve our customers and enable them to reap the benefits of IP telephony - such as improved customer service - it’s important that we integrate with and support product lines from vendors such as Extreme Networks" said Richard O’Hara, director, strategic alliances, Avaya. "Avaya is focused on building a reliable, ubiquitous, secure, open-standards based communication foundation across the variety of networks and technologies that our customers use"

Avaya provided Middletown with an advanced IP telephony solution that features an Avaya S8500 Media Server with industry-leading Avaya Communication Manager, the company’s IP telephony platform. The S8500 Media Server is designed for a distributed enterprise over an IP infrastructure. Middletown’s network also includes an Avaya G650 Media Gateway, which has the features, scalability, and system uptime that enterprises require for mission-critical telephony applications, and Avaya 4600 Series IP telephones. Middletown is using Avaya Site Administrator software, which is part of Avaya’s suite of network administration tools, and the Extreme Network EPICenter® network management application, to monitor and manage its converged network.

Extreme Networks provided Middletown with a consistent converged network solution based on its BlackDiamond® 8800 modular switch and Summit® edge switches. This is boosted with consistent software with advanced security and convergence features. Middletown can specify bandwidth priority, and minimum and maximum bandwidth per traffic group, which enables the creation of policies that guarantee network availability for voice traffic even during times of network congestion. This performance and consistency became significant when Township employees are downloading hefty video files and simultaneously utilizing VoIP.