STC Services and the Phillies, a Winning Combination!

As the Phillies celebrated their fourth consecutive National League Division crown on the road in Atlanta, STC took advantage of using Citizens Bank Park to host this year’s STC sponsored technology based “Lunch and Learn” program. This year’s annual event was held at Citizens Bank Park. It was selected primarily because of the correlation between the winning clubhouse atmosphere of the Phillies and spirt that exists amongst the STC Team.

A varied group of attendees representing local K-12 school districts, businesses and several industry consultants were treated to a very informative program. The discussion covered three main areas; a comparison of premise based vs. hosted (managed) telephone systems, the advantages of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and the convergence of mobile devices with PBX functionality. Representatives from Alcatel-Lucent and Agito Networks were also present and took part in the discussion. STC prides itself on making these sessions informative, allowing the attendees to comment and draw conclusions based upon industry discussion, research, and experience rather than clever marketing tools. All those present were also treated to a gourmet lunch and tour of the ball park, which included a walk through the Halls of Honor below the stadium, the clubhouse (we got to hold their bats), dugouts and standing on the field. All in all, a great day at the ball park!



We thank all who could be apart of this years event and look forward to next year’s extravangza.

Sunrise Medical Call Center Implementation

The Sunrise project started more than 2 ∏ years ago. There was a yearlong evaluation process where Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and Siemens were carefully scrutinized. The total project at the time involved 11 sites across North America, all new telephones for some 600 users, new voicemail, and a completely new call center for 110 agents.

The installation process also took a little more than a year. The customer and STC decided to install the 500 or so non-call center phones first. The telephone sets were received extremely well by all of the end users. The new centralized processor concept had some bumps in the road. The project definitely involved a close integration between the customer’s wide area network, which previously had been used only for Data Communications, and the new VOIP installation.

Over the months we saw a tremendous need for the customer’s team and a vendor team to get in sync. The Sunrise team and the ALU/STC team worked together extremely well. Good communication on a project of this size was essential, and it was at its best throughout this entire project. The vendor team had to understand the many factors that influence this customer. First, there were several of locations, a great number of people, a lot of travel, and a definite need for good communications between Sunrise and their own customers. The call center generates a critical amount of revenue for the business. The agents were scattered throughout multiple sites. Sunrise’s business internally was changing tremendously. They were leaving the telephone system that they had used for more than 15 years, and the telephone system vendor they had used for more than 20 years. This involved adapting to new telephone system architecture and different business culture. The customer and vendor teams came to grips with these important factors. Although it required considerable time, no piece of the solution was left untested before going live with the new call center, and in the end this lead to an extremely good first day.

Did you know...

Did you know...
There’s a difference between Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Messaging (UM).

UC refers to real-time communications across multiple devices and multiple locations using a single identity. This means you only publish one number that people can ring you simultaneously at your desk, your mobile or your PC. Google Voice is a good example of UC for consumers. The goal is to make it easier for people to reach you on your preferred device and if you miss the call, they consistently end up in one voicemail box. The proposed benefits are 1) you won’t miss an important call while you’re away from your desk, 2) your contacts don’t have to know about cell phone number changes – you just update your profile on your UC service, and 3) you don’t have to check multiple voicemail boxes. Keep in mind, you still have to answer the phone to make it work!

UM refers to two things. First, voice messages are delivered to your enterprise email inbox. That is the easy part, and by itself is called “integrated” messaging. To be “unified”, this next thing has to happen: the enterprise email and voicemail systems must update each other so that if you listen to or delete the message from email, the same message will be marked as listened to or deleted from the voicemail system, and vice versa. The benefit is less time spent managing your messages. The point behind UM is to make managing your voicemail easier by 1) accessing your voicemail from your interface of choice (over the phone or via the inbox), 2) “seeing” who left you a message (by the Caller ID in the email subject line), and 3) the ability to listen, forward and delete voicemail messages using standard email addressing, forwarding and replying controls. The danger with UM is that your voicemails become piled up in your cluttered inbox and don’t get paid the priority attention that voicemail messages usually deserve.

Remember it this way: UC is for U-Call and UM is for U-Message. Both are designed to be universal in reach, but both refer to two entirely different things.

STC Shines at the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce EWC Trade Show

The LV Chamber has over 6000 member businesses and the EWC Trade show is by far one of its most popular events. It has been some time since STC Services participated, but this year booths 116 & 117 shined brightly as STC displayed multiple telecommunications equipment and solutions. STC has been serving businesses throughout eastern PA and beyond for over 23 years and this event enabled us to let our local businesses see some of the benefits we provide our customers. It served as an excellent way to reacquaint existing customers and friends to our new telecommunications platforms and introduce ourselves to many new organizations we had not met before. It also gave us the opportunity to meet some local buyers for organizations like Crayola, Coca-Cola Bottling, PPL and many more.


STC proudly showed the many options and benefits of its flagship product, the Alcatel-Lucent Omni-PCX VOIP phone system. The phone system’s various models of telephones, wireless voice over Wifi devices and the newly released Alcatel-Lucent 4135 SIP based conference room phone with enhanced capabilities were all made available to view. Unified communications, enhanced voice mail, and voice mail to email stood brightly as a feature product solution. The AVST system demonstrated the value of what a robust voice mail solution can mean to a business’ level of productiivity. Our display included a comprehensive overview of our unified messaging platform and how easy it is to receive the benefits of deploying this technology. As an emerging technology, STC also highlighted mobility with technology enabling companies to connect an employees desk phone (PBX connected) to their smartphone, iphone, or Blackberry. This aspect allows for extension dialing to other coworkers no matter where they are located. In addition, employees have only one number for callers to remember when they want to reach them; and also it is an excellent way to slash expensive wireless calling charges.


STC Services plans to be involved with more events throughout the year. So look for more exciting announcements and invitations where you can see our products, applications and solutions on display at an event near you. We look forward to seeing you.

Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise Acronyms

For those of you looking to crack the code to the next best energy source, keep looking. But for those of you looking to crack the phrases and acronyms thrown around in the world of installing or maintaining an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise VoIP Telephony Communications System the following information might be helpful. There are a lot of acronyms used in the telecom industry. For many this can be very confusing and frustrating. Below we have listed some acronyms commonly used in the telecom world, and hopefully this can help you better understand your voice system.

(The items listed below are in what we consider logical order)

Alcatel - Alsace Cable & Telephony
OXE - OmniPCX Enterprise, the software name for the Alcatel-Lucent telephone system designed for medium to extra large businesses.
PCX - Private Communications Exchange (Alcatel’s version of PBX); sometimes used as another reference to OXE
Telephone Services - the OXE application, aka, Call Handling Application
Crystal - High-density modular hardware form factor; each “crystal” card having some processing, memory and power control capabilities, to provide a high throughput mesh topology on a traditional PBX chassis backplane; “crystal” interface cards connect externally via "switch tails"; “Crystal” also refers to a shelf/rack in the CLI status outputs.
Common - Low-density, modular hardware (RJ45 connections on cards)
CS CPU - Call Server CPU (running in the Common Hardware media gateway, slot 8)
AS CPU - Appliance Server CPU (running on the HP or IBM servers)
PCS – Passive Communications Server; rescues Media Gateways in the event of loss of signaling to the main Call Server
ACT - Alcatel Crystal Technology; also refers to a shelf/rack
MG - Media Gateway
OPS - OXE License Files
PC Installer – Call Server and Media Gateway (GD/GA) software loading tool to run from Windows
RMA - Remote Maintenance Access; usually a device with multiple serial ports and onboard modem for remote, out-of-band management access.
UC – Unified Communications (having the same telephone services available on different devices – desk, cell, PC)
UM – Unified Messaging (having voice messages show up in the email inbox and having the message status change across the board when checking voicemail from the phone or from the inbox – marked as read, saved or deleted)

We hope some of these definitions are of use to you! Please visit our website for more information regarding STC Services. Thanks for reading!

STC Services is proud to introduce it’s weekly technology blog! The goal of the blog is to provide insightful and timely information covering a wide range of technology related topics. You’ll find articles dealing with all aspects of voice, data and wireless communications and networks. The blog will be unique since its authors will be a diverse mix of experts in the field. You’ll enjoy articles written from the perspective of technical, business, sales & executive businesspersons.

STC Services started in Telecommunications as a consulting firm in 1987 and has grown over the years to include call accounting services for business and higher education, as well as, voice, LAN & WLAN network design and deployment. STC’s primary business partner is Alcatel-Lucent. Additionally, we’re partnered with AVST and Agito Networks. In future blogs we’ll discuss our partnerships and highlight why these relationships set STC apart as the premier Telecommunications company in Philadelphia, New Jersey, the Lehigh Valley & Central Pennsylvania.

The blog will be written by Terry O’Donnell, the founder and President of STC, Philip Gallina, who serves as STC’s Vice President of Operations, Matt Johnson, STC’s Sales Manager, Shawn Bloomfield, a Senior System Engineer and Matt Harwick, STC’s Director of Wireless Services along with occasional guest writers.

So please check back weekly to enjoy and benefit from STC’s tech blog containing solid industry information, written in a concise format. Also, explore STC’s website as we are regularly adding new features. We look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions! Please feel free to contact the editor at info@stcservices.com.