Melbourne Football Club moves to UC system

The IT manager of Melbourne Football Club had a big task ahead of him when he assumed the role a year and a half ago, as the phone system relied on double A batteries and the voicemail setup was ineffective to the point that staff members used their mobile phones for work calls instead.

Richard Arnott spoke to Computerworld Australia about the upgrade to ShoreTel's unified communications system, which took place not long afterwards he took up the position of IT manger.

The usability of the system

"The usability of the system was nearly impossible - people were using their mobile phones to call people down the hall."

Arnott said the impetus to upgrade the club's LG Aria phone systems came afterwards a variety of other projects were completed.

The time came to go to market

Once the time came to go to market, Arnott looked at a number of vendors including Cisco; in the long run settling on Shoretel's unified communications system for its low cost and all-in-one nature.

"The club was looking at just a phone system and not a unified communications system, and it was my job to take on those discussions and try to change the way they think about IT and communications," Arnott said.

The exact cost savings of the rollout

Despite not being able to measure the exact cost savings of the rollout, Arnott said the unified communications platform has already achieved its ROI.

"As far as I'm concerned, we've probably already reached an ROI just because we haven't had to call in any engineers, we haven't had any loss productivity, and the cost of the business of losing voicemails does have the potential to have an impact."