A city that’s nearly 350 years old with a trajectory of growth and innovation is destined to become a Smart City of today. In a move to achieve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness that would best serve its citizens, Woodbridge, NJ teamed with Avaya to create a unified, shared services model to support its municipal functions.
The fifth largest township in NJ has grown from a local hub of brick manufacturing into a bustling center of industry and commerce with a number of F500 companies operating within its borders. Business and population growth increased demand for services, putting pressure on the town’s increasingly complex, costly communications infrastructure.
Using an Avaya PodFx server, Woodbridge created a homogeneous network environment to bring together its disparate municipal functions, building a scalable, all-inclusive solution for voice, video and data collaboration. Avaya PodFx enabled Woodbridge to deploy a full stack of applications, servers, storage, networking and management components in a single, pre-integrated solution complete with orchestration and support.
The benefits for Woodbridge are clear: a greatly simplified network with dramatically reduced costs; faster, more efficient collaboration within and across departments and agencies, and a clear path to integrate new technologies as the town’s evolution continues. The new Avaya package is helping the school district save $70,000 a month in reduced maintenance and usage costs alone, enough to allow it to underwrite the cost of a private fiber network connecting it with the town’s other offices and provide funds for other priorities. Cost savings from the new infrastructure are being put to good use in other services, such as senior centers, new schools and a performing arts center.
Michael Esolda, CIO, Woodbridge, NJ said, “We are a shared service leader in the state. We have a centralized network operations center that deploys voice, data and video for 52 buildings, so all of our town, school, and police are connected — all our schools, 911 — directly in this network operations center.
