Mitel Networks has been chosen by the government of The Netherlands for a
six-year contract to deploy voice over IP to more than 50,000 phones in 96
divisions of the government.

The deployment, under a program called OverheidsTelecom 2006 (OT2006), will
serve eight ministries, seven provincial authorities, 30 municipalities and
51 administrative bodies and advisory boards, and more than 52,000 lines
will move to a Mitel platform over the next four years.

The requirements of the RFP were simple, says Adri Waterman, project
manager for Triple P, the system integrator for the project. “They wanted
the very lowest price,” says Waterman. “Price was 30 percent of the
scoring, and functionality was 70 percent.”

Behind that simple ratio, however, what is expected is essentially custom
systems for each government office, based on their individual needs. “What
was important was plain old IP telephony, but every project will have
specific functionality. Each department might have different requirements,
and those will be arranged within the overall agreement.”

The scope of the project is nearly 100 organizations, at “about 500
locations, maybe more. We don’t know yet,” says Waterman, adding, “It will
be a distributed system, not a big central system, but a very distributed
architecture.”

The ability to support unified communications and a presence in the
Netherlands were important factors in getting the contract. Mitel has previously done systems for the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports and several large businesses within the country.

Mitel products slated for deployment include the 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) a scalable, communication system designed to support networks ranging from 10 to 65,000 users. It provides standard IP-PBX capabilities plus unified communication applications such as unified messaging, auto attendant, automatic call distribution (ACD) and wireless. The 3300 ICP also supports applications including multimedia collaboration
and customer-relationship management.

The 3300 ICP supports a range of desktop devices including entry-level IP phones, Web-enabled IP devices, wireless handsets (Wi-Fi or IP-DECT) and full-duplex IP audio conference units.

Also scheduled for deployment is the Mitel Enterprise Manager suite, which provides a single management interface to monitor and manage the activities of one or a network of 3300 ICPs.