Retailer and publisher, Australian Geographic, has installed an IP network for sales transactions from Cisco and service provider IP Systems across its 60 stores nationally.

The integrated IP network carries voice, point-of-sale transaction data and EFTPOS banking transactions from Australian Geographic's nationwide retail outlets to its head office in Sydney's Northern Beaches region. The solution replaced a combination of private branch exchange (PBX) telephone, dial-up Internet and dial-up EFTPOS connections, which were expensive and difficult to manage.

Australian Geographic also uses the network to aggregate transactions into a single link from the head office to the bank. By consolidating all its EFTPOS connections into a single link, Australian Geographic has been able to reduce the cost of managing customer purchase transactions.

Dominic MacDonald, IT manager at Australian Geographic, said: "Integrating our EFTPOS banking traffic over the network considerably reduced costs, and errors such as staff incorrectly entering transaction amounts into the EFTPOS terminal. The management of the network has been simplified and telephony costs have also been reduced."

Australian Geographic has also deployed IP Systems' voice network phone solution across all sites. Each store now has a Cisco IP Phone 7940G and a Cisco 837 ADSL Broadband Router. Cisco 2600 Series routers were installed at the head office and warehouse, and the customer contact centre uses Cisco IP phones powered by IP Systems' virtual call-centre solution.

With the basic network in place, Australian Geographic has gradually been expanding its capabilities and the number of applications it operates over the network. This includes the delivery of its internal phone directory and other basic information services to each Cisco handset. The retailer also recently started streaming security camera footage over the network from one of its stores and future projects under consideration include using the IP handsets for basic human resource functions, such as staff 'clocking on and off', and for staff product training.

Cisco director of enterprise sales, Australia and New Zealand, Jeff Sheard, said; "This is a great example of a customer who understood the full potential of what you can do with Internet technologies to reduce operational costs and improve customer service in a retail environment."

Andrew Cox, marketing director of IP Systems, said; "With this project, Australian Geographic extended the envelope for business multiservice networks. IP Systems has delivered converged voice, video and data to businesses for years but adding EFTPOS was a new dimension.