The Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario’s (“FSRA’s”) aging PBX and supporting infrastructure is approximately 30 years old. This PBX (an Avaya Communication Server 1000) has passed the end of life. Maintaining the PBX and infrastructure in good working order is expensive, with no return on investment. Operating a legacy PBX also exposes FSRA to increasing degrees of operational risk as the likelihood of it failing increases with age.
FSRA is a growing organization. Staff levels are expected to reach 550 employees by the end of 2020. Also, FSRA is relocating to 25 Sheppard Avenue W, Toronto in the autumn of 2020.
The PBX is currently being supported by Eclipse, a non-OEM vendor procured via an OPS VOR arrangement. Avaya ceased sales for CS1000 in April 2018 and End of Manufacturer Support (“EoMS”) occurred in April 2019. Avaya indicated that the PBX can be maintained in service as-is during an extended service support window of 3 years for hardware and 5 years for software past the EoMS date. However, Avaya has also cautioned that new OEM spare parts availability may become an issue as some parts are no longer in production and future repairs may require the use of substitute or refurbished products.
A description of the current technical environment is found in Appendix D.
FSRA’s current telecom services are provided by Bell Canada with the contract owned and centrally managed by the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services (“MGCS”). FSRA has been given notice by MGCS that the ownership of this service is being decentralized and returned to FSRA to manage.
FSRA’s contact centre is operating under two separate systems. Skype and Symposium operate in parallel to fulfill FSRA’s current business commitments. A modern single contact centre would streamline and simplify the existing patchwork system.
The purpose of this procurement is two-fold: to procure a new SaaS-based telephony system and to procure a new Saas-based call centre system, i.e., 2 new systems to replace the existing PBX-based telephony system and the current call centre solution.
The new telephony system will permit FSRA to:
- Retire the legacy PBX and eliminate the risk of having a failure which will interrupt FSRA business operations
- Provide greater scalability and flexibility through Session Initiation Protocol (“SIP”) trunking.
- Enable enterprise voice and Unified Communications capabilities to increase staff productivity and mobility.
- Increase availability of telecom and fax services.
- Have the ability to integrate into new facility.
The new call centre system will permit FSRA to:
- Provide a strong foundation for future call centre capabilities.
- Obtain Computer Telephony Integration (“CTI”) capability that would allow FSRA to integrate the Call Centre solution with the future Cherwell® IT Service Management (“ITSM”) and Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) solutions.
- Have the ability to integrate into FSRA’s new facility.
FSRA may procure both the telephony and call centre from one Vendor or use separate Vendors for the two systems. If two Vendors are chosen, they must work collaboratively to implement the systems efficiently and effectively.The two systems will be implemented in a scheduled rollout, not to exceed five (5) months from the signing of a contract(s).
