Kleenmaid and Commander Communications get together

By Craig Zammit

SYDNEY: Commander Communications Limited and Australia’s largest direct retailer of kitchen and laundry appliances, Kleenmaid, today announced a partnership which will see Commander provide Kleenmaid’s entire fixed-wire voice and data telecommunication requirements.

“Selecting Commander to provide a converged telecommunications network is the next logical step towards providing a converged technology platform to our users,” said Kleenmaid IT Manager, David Ingram-Johnson.

“The converged network provides greater data bandwidth to all our stores along with improved telephony call rates. Initially 15 of our 34 stores nationally will enjoy access to significantly higher bandwidth which will allow us to consider the delivery of additional functional benefits including content management, IP telephony, in store cameras and video conferencing.

“We look forward to Commander rolling that greater bandwidth out across all stores,” he said.

The new national IP network will open a direct line of communication between Kleenmaid’s new head office in Maroochydore, its data centre in Brisbane and its 34 retail outlets across Australia.

The single, converged solution will include Commander OneStream VPN to deliver a national converged IP VPN, Commander OneStream phone lines and traditional phone lines to retail stores and Commander inbound services. The roll out of the Commander OneStream solution marks the second stage of Commander’s implementation of a full end-to-end IP solution for Kleenmaid.

In December 2006, Commander and Nortel installed an integrated Nortel IP PBX and contact centre into Kleenmaid’s head office. This included installation of a new Nortel CS1000S PABX system with IP handsets, contact centre software, voicemail and voice recording.

“Kleenmaid’s brand promise is ‘The Best You Can Own’ – a philosophy that reflects as much in the business solutions Kleenmaid chooses as it does in the quality of products they sell to customers,” said Commander Communications group general manager enterprise, Steve Evans.