Combest Finds ReliaTel to be the Right Fit

Established in 1994, Combest works in design, deployment and management of telephony and data networking. A while ago the Georgia company launched an effort to upgrade their service and support center the industry's best.  

Company officials wanted a service by which Combest could react to problems within their customers' voice environments, and needed a network management offering with enterprise-class remote monitoring and alarm notification capabilities.

When reviewing possibilities, they focused on products with "the robustness to manage and monitor the voice environments of Combest's worldwide customer base," company officials say, as well as "the flexibility to monitor the traditional PBXs and voice mail servers such as Definity, Meridian, SX2000, Intuity, and Octel," and other considerations, as well as set a goal of reducing the mean time to repair by 20 percent

Various products were rejected for reasons such as requiring expensive buffer boxes, which company officials say, "didn't make sense when many PBXs could dial out alarm information without adding additional hardware." 

In the end, Combest chose the ReliaTel network monitoring and management product from Tone Software (News - Alert) to meet their critical network management needs. 

ReliaTel, Combest officials say, satisfied the company's requirements of being able to monitor multi-vendor networks as well as provide the flexibility to scale to meet the changing needs of Combest's rapidly-growing customer base.

So now, Combest's service and support center can respond to alarms and service outages using ReliaTel, which gives them a variety of different notification mechanisms including e-mail, pager, phone, audio and visual alerts, Combest officials say: "Service and support center personnel are now quickly made aware of problems and given the information they need to quickly resolve the problem or escalate the problem to the appropriate field technician."

It seemed to work: Combest was recognized as Avaya (News - Alert)'s Business Partner of the Year, which was immediately followed the following year with Combest's selection as an Avaya Platinum Provider, the highest partnership designation awarded by Avaya -- given only to partners that deliver best-in-class customer service and support.

"The savings we have identified for our customers has built the kind of loyalty that keeps our customers on maintenance year after year. We were literally able to identify over $100,000 of saving for one customer after the first month of monitoring," noted Billy Strickland, Combest vice president.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi