COSTA CROCIERE

CHALLENGE

Costa Crociere, the leading Italian cruise company in Italy and Europe, is an international company with headquarters all around the world, not only in the major European capitals, but also in the United States, South America and Southeast Asia.

Since communications today are key for every company to conduct their daily business activities, this subjects gains strategic importance especially for businesses with many geographical branches.

In this scenario, Costa Crociere has been able to take advantage of the new ICT potential.

Costa Crociere was equipped with a vocal infrastructure, based on a diverse set of local switchboards, directly connected to the traditional telephone network. Although they guaranteed the basic telephone services, they did not allow the integration of the various systems in different locations, causing high costs both in terms of telephone company rates, and in maintenance and management. Furthermore, in 2004 Costa Crociere acquired AIDA, the leading cruise company in Germany, so there was the need to unify and integrate the two companies’ voice systems.

For all these reasons Costa Crociere decided to initiate a migration towards a modern and integrated communication system, based on the IP protocol, which would be able to deliver new communication services.

SOLUTION

Costa Crociere has completely entrusted Italtel with the implementation of the migration project, with the creation of two clusters of call managers in geographic redundancy, integrated with legacy systems of Costa Crociere, which made it possible to standardize and unify the switchboards between branches and to provide the users with new communications services. From the design of the new IP protocol-based voice communication infrastructure (VoIP), in less than four months Italtel migrated from the TDM communication network that links the Costa Crociere offices in Genoa and Paris. The activity now continues in Barcelona and Madrid.

Thanks to the new infrastructure, more than 1100 employees of Costa Crociere will benefit today from new collaboration and individual productivity tools, such as videocall, videoconference, instant messaging and presence, centralized address book and messaging.

A second phase of implementation of the project is scheduled for 2016 and will link the other offices of Costa, both in Europe and in the rest of the world (Shanghai, Miami, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires).

BENEFITS

At the end of the project, Costa Crociere achieved a simplification and standardization of the infrastructure, with improved platform management and operativity.

In addition to that, Costa Crociere users now have new collaboration tools and individual productivity that will help them carry out their activities.

In terms of future development, the implemented solution ensures maximum scalability, expandability and flexibility, and the future connection of all switchboards on board of the 25 Costa Crociere ships.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

The new telephone network has been implemented using the best technologies on the market, able to exploit the advantages offered by the VoIP architecture. The new platform has been integrated in VoIP to the existing call center, thus ensuring centralized management of all telephone routes, both towards the offices and to the Call Center, guaranteeing also a common access to the PSTN.
During the realization of this project, Italtel has provided a continuous technical assistance and pledged its support throughout the training activities agreed with the customer.
The reference technology partner for the supply of the solution is Cisco. In particular, we have adopted Cisco products of the Cisco Unified Communications family.

CONCLUSION

Once again Italtel proved to be capable of managing complex projects of telephone migration and stands out as a reference point for those multi-site Customers who wish to evolve their telephone infrastructure with VoIP technology.

Proximus

Vodafone Germany

For further information
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