Situated on the Gulf coast of Florida and encompassing the cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater, Pinellas County is home to close to one million people. Like many local governments, Pinellas County had been facing pressure to maintain high levels of public services even as economic uncertainty has left the County with flat to declining financial resources. To help stretch its $1.7 billion budget, the County has been looking for ways to increase operational efficiency and workforce productivity and combat rising administrative costs.

The Task

The Pinellas County government sought to generate efficiency savings and improve the scalability of its phone and communications networks. The County also wanted to strengthen its phone system’s ability to withstand natural disasters, such as a major hurricane.

The Solution

The County implemented an open Voice-over-IP communications platform from Atos Unify, including Atos Unify OpenScape Voice and Atos Unify OpenScape Xpressions technologies running on Atos Unify’s OpenScape UC Server. The project replaced more than 9,000 ports with VoIP phones, provided unified messaging, presence and conferencing capabilities, and has the capacity to scale to serve as many as 100,000 users.