American National Wildlife Fed hunts VoPI

MCLEAN, US: America's Non-profit conservation education and advocacy organization has taken the VoPI safari.

National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has chosen iCore Networks, the D.C. metro area’s provider of Voice over Private Internet (VoPI) services, to replace an aging phone and voicemail system with an intent to have reliable, flexible and cost-efficient internet telephony network that effectively supports teleworking.

“The primary reasons we chose iCore is to reduce NWF’s daily operational telecom costs, to ensure service and cost consistency across locations, and to reduce voice system administration,” said Don Hoppe, NWF’s Director of IT Technical Services. “Going into the contract, we know each account on the system would be billed at a consistent rate, each month we will be charged the same amount for each account regardless of the number of local or long distance calls. From a support perspective the iCore system provides a consistent set of voice system operations across locations, which reduces training requirements, support needs, and confusion.” Hoppe said, “iCore also structured in-bound 800 services to provide consistent billing.”

The new iCore system, initially, will link 380 users with four-digit dialing in the NWF’s Reston, Va. headquarters office; National Advocacy Center in downtown Washington, D.C.; Chesapeake Mid-Atlantic Regional Center in Annapolis, Md.; and Northeast Regional Center in Montpelier, Vt.

From a business perspective, Hoppe pointed out, recovering from a disaster of the NWF telecom system is a mission-critical consideration for a nationwide advocacy organization that relies heavily on charitable contributions. “We see the iCore system as being innovative and resilient from a disaster recovery standpoint,” he observed. “We can move phones almost anywhere in short order and get our phone system back online and get our business back up and running.”



As an environmental organization, Hoppe noted, NWF encourages and supports teleworking by its employees. “The iCore system fits in very nicely with our existing teleworking policy and enables us to provide voice services to staff when working from home,” he said.

According to Hoppe, the iCore system also provides value-added administrative benefits. “We now have a web-based interface to the iCore system that allows us to change many aspects of our user accounts,” he said. “This is done through a well-designed web portal interface that is much easier to use than our previous administration processes.”

Looking to the future, the new iCore system will enable NWF to deploy soft phone technology to expand teleworking opportunities for employees. “By installing software on laptop computers that emulates a telephone, road warriors and teleworkers can carry their office phone with them,” said Hoppe. Initially, this project is in a pilot phase, iCore will be providing softphone software for several computers, added the press release.

National Wildlife Federation (NWF) claims to be America's largest conservation organization, focuses its conservation work in three major areas that will have the biggest impact on the future of America’s wildlife: confronting global warming; protecting and restoring wildlife habitat and connecting people to nature.