The Office Furniture Partnership Designs Plan for Business GrowthWith Avaya IP Telephony Solution for Small, Medium Businesses

05-Jun-2006

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – With sales that tripled in five years, additional staff on its team and a move to new headquarters, The Office Furniture Partnership chose an IP telephony communication solution from Avaya (NYSE:AV) to keep pace with the Partnership’s growing client base and plans to expand worldwide.

The Partnership, which supplies premier office furniture products to companies in the New York metropolitan area, now has Avaya IP Office in its Morristown, N.J. headquarters. IP Office is a secure, intelligent, and easy-to-use converged voice and data system for small and medium businesses. The system was designed especially for smaller firms by Avaya, a leading global supplier of business communications software, systems and services.

“Our business has really taken off, and today we have 300 clients around the world, 25 employees and we’re looking to expand. But one thing hasn’t changed from the days we started this business: our customers are buying top-of-the-line furniture and want top-of-the-line service from us to go with it,” said Bob Rigby, one of the founders of The Office Furniture Partnership. “Our Avaya IP Office is absolutely key to helping us deliver that service.”

The Office Furniture Partnership’s seven full-time designers use IP Office to send and receive large data files of floor plans when working with clients such as architectural firms. “Capacity and speed is critical, especially when those huge files are going over the same network used by voice communications,” Rigby said. “IP Office easily meets both criteria. Plus, we’ve integrated IP Office with our electronic data ordering system, so we can consolidate ordering and keep records over a single network.”

IP Office also enables the Partnership’s employees to work remotely, no matter where they are located, whether in the office or on the road making sales calls, with the same features employees have in the headquarters location.

The company recently opened a sales office in nearby New York City, where three employees are linked to the headquarters location via their laptops, managing phone calls with an IP softphone application. To give the New York City office sufficient telephone coverage, ensure customers’ calls are handled promptly and personally, and free up its small New York City staff to focus on selling to new clients, The Office Furniture Partnership uses IP Office to route incoming calls to its New Jersey headquarters. “This way, our staff focuses on bringing in new business rather than answering phone calls, and customers still get personalized service from our headquarters team,” Rigby said. Both the headquarters and New York employees have their incoming voice calls automatically forwarded to their mobile phones, giving them increased mobility and ability to stay in touch with clients.

The Office Furniture Partnership also uses the messaging applications of IP Office. Twenty five networked Avaya IP telephones with four-digit dialing enable staff to contact each other and share information quickly. When they’re out of the office on sales calls or helping customers, employees use an “automatic notification” feature that calls them when new voice messages arrive in their voice mailbox, which ensures calls are handled efficiently and helps keep clients satisfied. As The Office Partnership business grows, especially around the world, Rigby plans to use the built-in audio conferencing feature of IP Office to connect employees and customers.

The Avaya IP Office at The Office Furniture Partnership was sold by the Farmstead Telephone Group., Inc., an Avaya Platinum BusinessPartner based in East Hartford, Conn.. The solution was installed and is maintained by Avaya Global Services. Avaya has sold more than 60,000 IP Office solutions to companies around the world.

About Avaya, Inc.
Avaya, Inc. designs, builds and manages communications networks for more than one million businesses worldwide, including over 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®. Focused on businesses large to small, Avaya is a world leader in secure and reliable Internet Protocol telephony systems and communications software applications and services.

Driving the convergence of voice and data communications with business applications - and distinguished by comprehensive worldwide services - Avaya helps customers leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results. For more information visit the Avaya Web site: http://www.avaya.com.

About FIFA World Cup 2006™ and Avaya
As the Official Convergence Communication provider for the 2006 FIFA World Cup™, Avaya is providing a champion communications network infrastructure for the World’s largest sporting event. The converged network – that combines voice and data on the same infrastructure – will connect the 12 FIFA World Cup stadiums, the media centers in all stadiums and the FIFA headquarters in Berlin. Players, coaches, volunteers and fans alike will benefit from the Avaya network that will be instrumental in player and journalist accreditation, results reporting, material tracking, accommodation confirmations, transportation, and ticketing, among other critical functions. With an estimated 45,000 network connections, 30,000 network devices and over 15 terabytes (or 15,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data, it is the largest converged communication network ever built for a sporting event.

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Barbara Burgess

Media Relations

Avaya

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