"I went through the phone book and looked at phone vendors in the neighboring areas," said Dave Platko, director of technology for the Diocese of Saginaw. "There just weren't many to choose from. That's when our consulting company went out and found more vendors who would be capable of bidding out a project our size. They brought in three or four more vendors they had worked with in the past and who had done a good job for them. Teoma Systems was one of them."

"As with most non-profits, funding is very tight," said Platko. "Churches in general, I've found, expect to get everything for very little or no cost. While we don't operate under that same philosophy, we still don't have a ton of money to work with. We understand that anyone who works with us is entitled to make a reasonable profit to stay in business so they can serve us better. I feel like Teoma did a good job of finding that balance."

"The PRI circuit eliminated 10 lines," said Platko. "By eliminating those outside lines, we're saving a significant amount of money every month."

"On the high school side there are about 28phones, mainly throughout the administrative and business offices and a few classrooms," Platko said. "We looked at putting phones in every classroom but the school wasn't in a position to run cabling to all of the classrooms or go to a converged wireless system. We wanted to get this major upgrade taken care of initially and we're looking at phones in the classrooms as a next step. I'm confident that we would leverage Teoma's Systems Integration, Data and Telephony experience and capabilities, whether it's in IP Telephony over Wireless LAN or Unified Messaging.

"I was very impressed with Teoma as far as the people we have had to deal with," he said. "They've done a really good job. They've been fair with us in all of our dealings, and I'm much more impressed with the Avaya hardware and the service Teoma provides in supporting it than I was with the old system."

Diocese of Saginaw, Dave Platko