The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has rolled out a round-the-clock multimedia conferencing solution from Telstra Business Services (TBS), a Nortel reseller, to support 25,000 users nationwide.

The new conferencing capabilities, based on the Nortel Multimedia Communication Server 5100, is expected to generate cost savings by eliminating rental fees for ATO’s monthly teleconferences.

As an organisation dispersed throughout Australia, ATO makes regular use of teleconferencing facilities.

“Through TBS, we had in place a hosted teleconferencing service that gave us adequate functionality, but we wanted to enhance its features, such as 24X7 access to audio conferencing facilities,” said Colin McLean, assistant commissioner at the Tax Office. “The Nortel solution gives individual users round-the-clock access to personalised multimedia conferencing, and gives us a system that, at the end of the current facilities management contract, we tangibly own as an asset as opposed to something we rent.”

"We are looking for ways to save on travel costs through collaborative computing, and the Nortel solution is one way we’ll be doing that,” McLean said. “The MCS 5100 addresses our teleconferencing requirements and introduces a range of collaborative computing applications that will drive our communications as a virtual enterprise of connected users."

Nortel's MCS 5100 is independent of ATO’s PABX platform, and it integrates with any existing analogue, digital, or IP-based system (ATO supports a dual-vendor strategy that includes a Nortel PABX). It also employs encryption to ensure that voice, video and data communications are fully secure from end-to-end, even over wireless networks.

“The Nortel MCS 5100 has created a unique collaboration environment for ATO with its refined set of converged voice, video and data applications,” said Mark Stevens, president, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel. “It is an environment that engages the human experience of business communications by encouraging collaboration between users irrespective of their location or the device they’re using to communicate, and integrates intuitively with the tools that Tax Office users are already accustomed to using for audio and video conferencing.”

The new conferencing system has been available to employees since early July 2005.