Avaya Helps City of Shawinigan Transform into a Smart City

Quebec community is ready to deliver new, innovative services to citizens after future-proofing its network with Avaya Fabric Connect

Markham, ON. – January 26, 2017 – The City of Shawinigan, Quebec has transformed into a Smart City, implementing Avaya Fabric Connect to create a future-proof network solution that’s reliable, secure and capable of delivering innovative technologies and new services to citizens.

Looking to breathe new life into its community, Shawinigan started the project in 2014 to help revitalize its economy, grow new employment opportunities and improve overall quality of life. The Avaya solution allowed Shawinigan to gradually upgrade its outdated, disparate equipment linking City Hall to warehouses, fire halls, the library and water distribution systems, rather than replace their whole network at once. This phased implementation helped ease budget demands and reduce disruption to ongoing operations as well as demands on IT personnel.

Needing a reliable, secure way to manage the network, Shawinigan also liked Avaya’s approach to hyper-segmentation, which isolates traffic for day-to-day operational services from other traffic, such as that for communications around critical services. This prevents unauthorized access by hackers or other extensive damage from viruses that may be released onto the network. 

Today, with the backbone of its new network complete—and working seamlessly with the remaining older equipment—Shawinigan is looking forward to expanding its public Wi-Fi network service, which will offer to citizens and visitors free Internet access points, and its recently-announced urban DEL street lighting project, which will be controlled by an automated management system.

For more details on how Avaya is helping Shawinigan transform into a Smart City, click here for the case study.

 “In addition to modernizing our network, Avaya technologies are helping us do more by investing in a sustainable infrastructure. The equipment selected guarantees transparency, redundancy, segmentation capabilities and the security we need, all while paving the way to the introduction of new services for our citizens.”

Lyne Vallières, Director of the Office of Information Technology, Town of Shawinigan

About the City of Shawinigan
Shawinigan is a municipality located in Mauricie in Quebec, along the St-Maurice River. It counts almost 50 000 citizens and reaches across 737 km2.  The City employs nearly 490 people, including 380 full-time employees. The Office of information technology, whose mandate is to oversee the IT equipment and services, caters to about 225 employees from different divisions on its territory.

About Avaya
Avaya enables the mission critical, real-time communication applications of the world’s most important operations. As the global leader in delivering superior communications experiences, Avaya provides the most complete portfolio of software and services for contact center and unified communications with integrated, secure networking— offered on premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Today’s digital world requires some form of communications enablement, and no other company is better positioned to do this than Avaya. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

Certain statements contained in this press release may be forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology.  We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these are reasonable, such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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