| | November 20208owadays telephone technologies are in every aspect of our lives. The exponen-tial growth of new information technol-ogies during recent years has increased employees' enthusiasm for improved communications and collaboration tools. Finding ways to better connect all communica-tion technologies, including the corporate phone system, could increase employee productivity and collaboration while decreasing corporate costs.I joined MANA Products, a New York City-based cosmetics manufacturing company, three years ago as the VP & CIO. MANA is one of the world's leading contract and private label cosmetics manufacturers, creating color cosmetics, skincare, and hair care products for the prestige and mass markets for over 40 years.With rapidly-growing workforce of over 1,000 employees, MANA had an old AVAYA Analog hosted-PBX phone system when I joined. Even though the system was working well at the time, it was an outdated system that was presenting numerous issues. It was expensive to maintain, and parts and components were often unavailable. Additionally, it lacked redundancy and offered no collaboration tools. I knew I needed a phone system that offered first-rate call management and mobility, increased productivity, and low-cost scalability. However, our legacy Avaya Analog PBX did not provide any of these needs. Altogether, MANA was spending more than $100,000 per year for calls, T1 lines and maintenance.Opulent OfferI was determined to cut costs and implement the latest technologies to bring the company's communications more in-line with the business' rate of growth. I looked at Cisco, Avaya, and Verizon but found them all to be too expensive. I chose 3CX's Unified Communications solution for its superb value proposition, cheap maintenance, and rich feature set. Initially, since we did not have an immediate need for a new phone system, my team wanted a system that would help them learn more about VoIP technologies. We first deployed 3CX in January 2016 as a trial run after being convinced by a free evaluation as well as by the incredible ease of installation and management, affordability, and user-friendliness. For one of MANA's Network Engineers, a day spent reviewing the 3CX product was all it took for him to be able to pass the 3CX Certification Exam.Elegant Installation and DeploymentInstallation was neat and simple, with the help of 3CX Partner. Since the solution is software-based and runs on standard operating systems no special training was required for administrators.VOIP PHONE SYSTEM BRINGS EXQUISITE COMMUNICATIONS MAKEOVER TO MANA PRODUCTSBy George Alexandrou, VP & CIO, Mana ProductsN IN MY OPINION
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