Laura Kempke
Schwartz Communications
(781) 684-0770
digium@schwartz-pr.com
Julie Webb
Digium
(256) 428-6203
jwebb@digium.com
ORLANDO (VoiceCon; Booth #1229), March 22, 2010-Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today announced that Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has won the Digium Extreme Phone Makeover contest. Boys and Girls Club will receive a Switchvox Unified Communications system, the full-featured and cost-effective VoIP solution designed for small- to mid-sized businesses, and Polycom® SoundPoint® IP phones for a complete system valued up to $10,000.
The mission of Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg is to serve as a neighborhood facility-based organization working daily to assist youth of all backgrounds in developing self-esteem and character. The organization was selected based on their impressive entry, which outlined the extreme limitations of their 10-year-old phone system and lack of funding to upgrade their current system. They currently cannot place calls between offices without interruption of service or afford to host conference calls for their board meetings. Without new technology, they are limited in being able to effectively communicate with the parents and youth in their community.
"We're absolutely thrilled Digium has chosen us as the Extreme Phone Makeover winner," said Yvonne Hollins, executive director of Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg. "Our phone system is critical to helping us provide services to the youth and parents in our community. If a parent is trying to reach their child or our office, we want to make sure any one of our three offices can handle the call. And if a child is in need, we don't want them to be placed into voicemail - we want to be able to respond to the call immediately. Today, our handsets are literally falling apart - so we cannot wait to have new Polycom phones! Another reason we're thrilled we won is because we needed a way for our Board of Directors to meet via monthly conference calls, but all of the options we considered before were cost prohibitive. With the Switchvox system, we'll be able to manage conference calls without any additional charges, and we'll save much more on our monthly communication expenses."
Anteil Inc., an authorized Digium reseller, will assist with the network assessment and installation of Digium's Switchvox SMB system and Polycom IP phones. "We're delighted Boys and Girls Club was selected as the winner," said Jim Capp, president and CEO of Anteil. "They are in desperate need of a new system - we've worked with them before and this will truly be a phone makeover that will make a difference in how they can help the community and these very deserving kids."
The Extreme Phone Makeover for Boys and Girls Club will also include these benefits:
- Ability to connect office workers at three remote office locations;
- On-demand Conferencing capabilities, enabling their office and Board of Directors to save money on travel time for monthly meetings;
- Access to call reports for each office, including reports that indicate peak call times and full data on all calls so that they can staff appropriately for peak call times and respond to parents and youth more quickly;
- Call recording to assist in training new employees or volunteers;
- Integration between calls and other office communications, including fax, call conferencing, web mashups, on demand reports, call queues and more, all displayed via web interface;
- Ability to see the location of callers on Google Maps so that Boys and Girls Club can see which locations in their community generate the most incoming calls; and
- The industry's best call quality with Polycom's HD Voice technologyTM which will eliminate phone conversation errors and time wasted asking people to repeat themselves.
"We created this contest to give a deserving small business a chance to improve the way they communicate with their customers," said Tristan Barnum, director of Switchvox product marketing for Digium. "In a weak economy, many non-profits - like the Boys and Girls Club - have outdated technology and believe they can't afford a complete phone system overhaul. It's great to see Boys and Girls Club benefit from an Extreme Phone Makeover and, as a result, gain the advanced communications features they need to better service the children in their community. That's what this makeover is all about - making them more efficient and giving them a competitive edge that improves the way they can deliver services."
"This contest demonstrates that there are highly-affordable, enterprise-class phone systems available to companies of any size," said Tim Yankey, senior director of product marketing at Polycom. "The combination of Polycom phones and Digium's Switchvox system is going to help Boys and Girls Club completely transform the quality of their communications. We look forward to helping this deserving winner and other small businesses save money and improve their productivity by upgrading their phone systems."
Due to the overwhelming response to this promotion, Digium and Polycom are extending the Extreme Phone Makeover contest through June 11, 2010, to assist other companies who need to improve their business communications. Businesses should enter to win at http://www.extremephonemakeover.com.
About Digium
Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Asterisk Business Edition and Switchvox IP PBX software to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of hardware to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey solutions or to design their own voice over IP (VoIP) systems. More information is available at http://www.digium.com.
The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, Asterisk SCF, Switchvox, Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Appliance and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
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