ce its aging and out of date telephone system with a new, cloud-based system, village treasurer Paula Kerbert told the village board on October 5. At the previous village board meeting, trustee Terry Parisian had asked her to get three proposals for a new telephone system.
A cloud-based system offered by ITC Solutions offers greater flexibility for a lower price than the provider she had recommended at the earlier meeting. “What he’s offering is more than a replacement,” Parisian said. While the previous bid was an offer for telephones only, “ITC is offering a replacement of our existing phone provider, so he cut out – even though it looks like a higher dollar value per month, we’re actually saving, and taking away phone charges on the back end.”
The ITC phone system isn’t installed on site, Parisian said. “It resides at the provider’s complex on their server. If the village hall burned down, we could still access the phone because the phone equipment resides off site.”
“It’s in a cloud instead of residing within a box in the back,” Kerbert explained. “It’s in the cloud, and we would never drop a call, or lose a call. The phone system would always be up and running.”
Parisian said the other two providers had offered a “pot” system, that is a plain old telephone system. ITC’s off-site offering was a more robust system.
The system would cost $72,025 to buy outright, Parisian said. “This system would give a lot more bang for our buck.”
The village now uses Spectrotel service, Kerbert said. Trustee Donald Hackett asked how much the village would save with a changeover. Kerbert said the village would realize savings of about $186 per month.
Because the system is software based, it can be upgraded regularly, Parisian added, something that could not be done with a conventional system. “This system would pay itself off in three years,” said trustee Jeannine Mayer.
The one caveat raised by mayor Bill Murphy was that a cloud-based system would be more vulnerable to hacking. “Anything that’s stored in the cloud, there are privacy issues,” he said. He asked Kerbert to check with the company as to its security systems, “I don’t want someone accessing a call to my wife about my kids,” he said. Otherwise, however, the system was “putting us into the 21st century and we’ve gotta be ready for it,” Murphy said.
The board agreed to approve the purchase of the ITC system, pending a report on the company’s security procedures which Kerbert promised to get.
Join the family! 
