Whaleback Managed Services picked Bright House Networks to help provision its managed voice services to a health care facility in Tampa Bay.

Whaleback announced today that Northside Mental Health Center, a non-profit organization serving Hillsborough County residents suffering from or at risk of mental illness, chose its CrystalBlue cloud-based managed voice services.

Northside serves more than 8,000 people per year with a staff of more than 250 employees, four locations and six residential buildings, and its community support center voicemail system needed to be revamped. The four locations’ phone systems, bought at different times, were not integrated. With 70 percent of calls initiated from within Northside, internal calls were handled by a live operator, which was inefficient and often left callers with busy signals and no ability to connect their phone calls.

Northside director of information systems Bill Camp said the Whaleback VoIP system cost less than the previous one and also used less of his IT resources.

In order to smooth the transition over to Whaleback CrystalBlue services, Northside also switched to high-speed fiber-optic Internet service from partner Bright House Networks.

“Bright House Networks provides the security and quality needed for advanced voice and data services through our state-of-the-art fiber network,” said Nick Lenoci, corporate vice president of business solutions at Bright House Networks. “We are pleased to partner with Whaleback on improving business communications for the Northside Mental Health Center.”

Whaleback’s total pricing for Northside’s four centers was below the cost Camp had been paying for each separate system, and Camp has seen a 10 percent to15 percent reduction in phone bills while experiencing virtually no down time using Whaleback.

“Whaleback saves us a lot of time,” Camp said. “Now calls from within and without of the organization are direct, with no operator required. Those operators now concentrate on other administrative tasks, and additional staff can now dial the person they want to speak with directly with just a four digit extension or direct dial, if away from the agency.”