Alistair Birch Email & Phone Number

Sydney, Nsw, Au

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Principal Engineer and Team Lead responsible for Video Conferencing in Meeting Rooms at the Bank's 750 locations across Australia and Globally.Stablized the service, increasing single-touch meeting start success rate from 73% to over 99.5% with a commensurate increase in user satisfaction.Introduced a common look across all types of meeting room equipment - newer Teams Rooms and older SIP-based rooms - providing an consistent experience to staff whatever the generation of equipment in their building.Managed deployment 350 new Teams Rooms to the new CommBank HQ building in Sydney as well as to metro, regional and international offices.Migrated 700 legacy SIP meeting rooms from Poly Interop to Pexip Interop without disruption to staff or service interruption.Introduced proactive monitoring of all meeting room equipment, so relevant staff were alerted and faults could be remediated in most cases before there was user impact. Developed a Sharepoint- and Powershell-based platform which aggregated the monitoring from various sources to provide a holistic per-room user experience health status categorized as green/amber/red.Introduced the new O365 Room Finder including searching by GPS location, room size and features.Monitored video call performance for issues, identifying reasons for user dissatisfaction and explaining these issues to the relevant vendors and internal resolver teams.

Melbourne, Australia

Principal Engineer responsible for UC Services at John Holland, responsible for a 90% reduction in failed video meetings while delivering a 10x increase in volume as well as a migration of the telephony platform from ISDN to Teams using Direct Routing and Sony's/Ribbon SBC.Designed and deployed AV at the new 500-seat Headquarters building in Melbourne including rooms based on Microsoft Surface Hub and Microsoft Teams Room (MTR) integrated with Crestron hardware.Deployed Microsoft Teams across AU/NZ/SG replacing Skype for Business in an expedited timeframe due to COVID including integrating Teams with existing ISDN circuits and later migrating these circuits to SIP.Introduced a Standard Operating Environment for our VC Infrastructure including update rings, version control and monitoring.Automation of many common administrative tasks using Powershell and SQL, improving delivery performance and consistency (same request => same result, every time).Deployment, Management and Monitoring of Surface Hubs and Microsoft Teams Rooms using Azure, Endpoint Manager and Teams Room PremiumThird-Level Support and Administration of Office 365 including Microsoft Teams, Azure AD, Endpoint Manager/Intune, Exchange and Sharepoint.

Melbourne, Australia

Principal engineer responsible for telephony and collaboration systems at MYOB.Deployed Microsoft Teams across AU/NZ including implementing Direct Routing for PSTN for all locations with central Sonus/Ribbon SBC and migrating the users and data from predecessor systems including Skype for Business and Avaya PABX.Added the first third-party offshore location to the Genesys contact centre, built securely with high resiliency and maximum flexibility and scalability based on thin clients connected back to on-shore compute.Decomissioned all legacy ISDN circuits and migrated services onto replacement SIP trunks.Third-Level Helpdesk and Administration of Office 365 including Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Exchange, Sharepoint and O365 Security/Compliance.

Sydney, Australia

Six Month fixed-term contract to write playbooks to provide direction for Telephony and Collaboration services in Government Agencies in New South Wales including detailed roadmaps for Mobility, Unified Communications and residual ISDN.

Sydney, Australia

Manager for the Voice and Collaboration Services at a leading Australian bank with over 30,000 staff in 1100 domestic and 20 international locations, $24m budgetSkype for Business: introdeuced 10,000 audio conferencing users to Microsoft Skype for Business platform, including leading the technical and organizational Change Management, and delivering 99% adoption of the new platform and a reduction in conferencing spend of $2m/year. Cisco Unified Communications Manager: migrated 30,000 users in 1,100 buildings across Australia to a cloud-based Cisco HCS voice solution, delivering process improvements while reducing spend by $3m/year.Voice Recording: Introduced a globally consistent Voice Recording platform including retention/disposal policies, automatic offsite storage, and global real-time access by compliance.Trading Floor: Migrated twelve trading floors across Australia, Asia, Europe and United Stated to a new consistent BT voice trading platform, delivering a like-for-like trader experience with zero disruption to trading, and reducing operational expenditure by $0.5m/year Mobility: managed the migration of whole buildings from desktop to mobile telephony, and initiated a first-in-Australia project to replace deskphones with mobile phones in branches while retaining local customer landline numbers.Global Voice Network: Introduced on-net dialling between 1,000 domestic branches and 100 admin buildings, and extended the domestic voice network to cover international offices.Telecom Expense Management: Eliminated internal billing/recharge disputes by migrating the phone expense recharge system to a new employee-id based model, while also greatly reducing complexity associated with staff churn.

Greater New York City Area

Manager/Lead Engineer for the Dealing Room and Desktop Voice infrastructure covering ten offices across US, Canada and South America; $4.1m budget; 6 direct reports.Relocation: design engineer and project lead for the relocation of all Voice and Video services to Nomura's new office in Midtown New York.Migration: Migration of multiple NEC PBXes with CAS integrations to Dealerboard Turret systems at twelve offices across US/Canada onto a common US-wide Cisco Call Manager and common Dealerboard Turret system, including importing the NEC and IPC configurations into a transition database to ensure 100% error-free conversion of 4,000 FNNs and private wires and 3000 phone as well as maintaining dealerboard layouts and voice recording during the hardware refreshes.Business Continuity: Implementation of Business Continuity technologies and procedures to deliver any FNN at any site – the Month-long shutdown of the Office HQ/Datacentre following Hurricane Sandy resulted in zero lost trading days for NomuraVideo Conferencing: Rollout of desktop video conferencing to 100% of staff, fully integrated with the existing Tanderg room-based systemsExpansion: Scaling the voice systems from 400 to 2,500 positions following the partial acquisition of the former Lehman business.

New York, Ny

Migration: Migration of multiple Nortel and NEC PBXes at ten offices across US/Canada onto a common US-wide Cisco Call Manager and Voicemail system, in phases which included replacing Call Pilot with Unity on the Nortels ahead of the actual Cisco Migration. Included importing the Nortel and NEC configurations into a transition management database to ensure 100% error-free conversion of 3,500 FNNs and phone layouts.Contact Centre: Improved service resolution time and first-call-resolution rate at the IT Service desk by introducing skills- and location-based routing to send calls to the nearest available technician most able to assist the caller.Service Improvement: Increased the efficiency of voice support staff from 500:1 phones:staff to 1500:1 whilst reducing the average resolution time for voice tickets from 2 days to 4 hours.Certification: Arranged ITIL foundation training for all voice staff and obtained ISO 9001 quality certification for the entire voice group including all processes

New York, Ny

Merger: Merged the voice infrastructure of Cantor with the recently acquired Eurobrokers, including preserving all FNNs while moving from a 4- to 5-digit internal dialplan.QSIG Migration: Migrated the existing CAS-based IPC system onto Cisco-based QSIG including preserving all trader line appearances and permitting trader migrations between the BT and IPC trading floors

Perth, Wa

International Deployments: Arranged the deployment of IP Telephony in greenfield Woodside locations in Nairobi, Kenya and Beijing, China including project managing all local vendors necessary to deliver this outcome without travelling on-site.Fax: Implementation t38 over low bandwidth/high latency links to offshore oil ringsUS Secondment: Sent to the US for six Months to lead the Voice and WAN transformation of the three US offices