Opened in 2001, Aspen Group is an ASX-listed property investment and funds management group.  While Aspen Group’s headquarters are located in Perth, the company has grown to include corporate offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Prior to 2009, Aspen Group headquarters was struggling to manage the disparate telephone systems in place across the different sites, and turned to Sierra Systems for a solution.

We designed a converged network to connect all four corporate offices with an end-to-end Cisco solution, comprising routers, switches, unified communications and firewalls. We implemented Quality of Service (QoS), a technology which classifies and prioritises various types of data in the network, thus ensuring that more delicate data – such as Voice – never suffers any delays. In order for the national communications network to function as a single telephone system, we installed a Cisco Unified Communications Manager Clusters split between the Perth and Sydney offices for redundancy, creating a robust and distributed voice solution. This cluster ensures that the network is highly available: if a single site’s call manager is unavailable, the other call managers will back it up so that the system remains active. Other sites’ communications were protected from WAN failure with Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) technologies to ensure uninterrupted voice communications at all times.

As the communications network is now under their autonomous control, Aspen Group easily manages the activity of the network across the various sites. The maintenance and support of the hardware is greatly simplified due to the fact that every site uses the same equipment. Cisco Unity technology integrates with the Microsoft Exchange mail server service so that voicemail is delivered as an email, which naturally can be accessed through any internet connection.

Recently, Aspen Group expanded its network to serve the residents at the Aspen LV Plus Ballina site. Based on this successful expansion, the next phase will see Sierra Systems develop the plan for expansion of Aspen Group’s infrastructure to over 45 caravan parks located throughout Australia. The compnay will benefit in various ways, as it truly takes advantage of the foundational work already completed.

Download the Aspen Group Case Study (pdf) and read about our other Corporate clients.