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Date Added: 17 April 2009

Unison rolls out at 400 FNB branches

Unison Communications, a specialised software company focused on enterprise communications, has announced that it has rolled out its management and call billing application, Galactrix, at 400 branches within First National Bank (FNB), as part of a roll-out that will see the company deploy its software at 700 branches nationwide.

The contract is now in its fourth phase, with phase five seeing Unison deploying its software at another 100 branches by the end of the year.

This was confirmed by Craig Young, MD of Unison, who said the roll-out, which started in the first quarter of last year, is “going according to plan”. Young said the contract carried a “substantial” value.

He said part of the reason for the deployment of its Galactrix software is to reduce communications costs for FNB, including its telephone communication costs.

The FirstRand Banking Group, which includes First National Bank (FNB), the second largest banking entity in South Africa, identified its overall expenditure on voice communications as an area in need of management, analysis, evaluation and possible subsequent attention.

“We believe our spend on voice communications to be extremely high and in our view, higher than is necessary,” commented Aziz Cassim, Head of Hogan Technology at FNB. “We have a very complex voice network and one that continues to grow rapidly. It currently consists of our own infrastructure together with those provided by Telkom SA, the various cellular providers and other data carriers; and thus a platform to properly manage these various cost structures is desperately needed. Consequently, we have given top priority to this focused area of our business and have engaged Unison Communications to undertake this particular project.”

“Unison Communications have a long standing relationship with FNB,” continued Cassim “As the market leader in voice infrastructure management analysis and call billing analysis, they already have a good understanding of our business challenges and some of their resources are already on-site. In addition, Unison Communications also supplies services to other entities within our group such as at our head office building, FNB BankCity, Home Loans and Wesbank. Our intention is to work towards a consolidation of these platforms that would satisfy our overall objective of a true centralised voice management environment.”

Commenting further, Young said the branch banking area (±700 branches) of FNB was chosen to be the top priority sub-sector for this activity, a process that involves an on-going analysis and understanding of the volumes associated with the bank’s voice traffic.

About Unison Communications

Unison Communications (Pty) Ltd, established in 1983, is the South African industry leader in Enterprise Call Billing and Management, Unified Voice and Fax processing solutions. The Company develops, sells, implements and maintains world-class systems that are all locally developed. It has representation in the four major regions of South Africa, has installed more than 10000 individual systems in South African and its neighbouring territories and is the local market leader for high-end Call Billing Platforms. Its substantial customer database of over 8000 companies/organisations includes most Corporate and Government entities in Southern Africa and over 600 clients from outside the country. Unison is a Proudly South African Company.