There are multiple reasons why NIU is making this change:
- The current phone switch was installed over 35 years ago and is no longer manufactured or under warranty. The supportability of the phone switch has become inadequate with a shrinking number of vendors providing support and replacement parts becoming more expensive and increasingly difficult to source.
- The current phone switch was designed to support four times the amount of NIU's current calling volume. With email, cell phones, and an increasing amount of collaboration taking place over Teams and Zoom, the average monthly outgoing call volume is about 6 calls per month for 95% of the assigned phone numbers at NIU with approximately 2000 phone numbers not making any calls.
- The age of the existing phone switch presents limitations to enhancing voice services such a voicemail transcription, integration with our Microsoft 365 collaboration platform, and geo-redundancy to limit downtime.
- High operating and support expenses of nearly $2M can be reduced by nearly $400K by moving our voice services to Microsoft Teams.