One could argue that the greatest impact of (snom’s dedication to) interoperability and open standards can be measured in dollars or deployments or even ease of use. But in the case of EsSalud, the national healthcare network of Peru, the greatest outgrowth of interoperability and open standards is scalability.

In 2007, as the national Government of Peru began a substantial modernization and expansion of its hospital and healthcare system, technology officials decided to move from a traditional TDM phone system to an all Internet protocol (IP) network capable of handling voice, data and video across the country. With the help of SUMTEC, the largest technology and communications systems integrator in the country, EsSalud embarked on a mission to deploy an Asterisk-based IP voice communications system across hundreds of locations. After testing several endpoint solutions, SUMTEC and EsSalud chose a single desktop phone vendor – snom.

Today, SUMTEC and its installation partners have installed 10,000 snom phones across the 400 locations, with 90 percent being snom 300 desktop phones and the remaining snom 370s. EsSalud also took advantage of snom’s unique SIP-based paging unit, the PA-1, which is installed in several locations as a public address system.

SUMTEC and EsSalud will continue to roll out snom phones and new systems to the remaining 30 percent of locations that have not been upgraded, as well as include the system in any new construction.

With a project of such magnitude, scalability was, and continues to be, the catchword of the deployment, but that doesn’t discount costs. After testing phones from GrandStream and Polycom, SUMTEC and EsSalud found snom phones provided greater interoperability at a lower price point. Officials report the choice of snom phones has saved EsSalud more than $1 million (US) to date.

While the project has been heralded a success for EsSalud, SUMTEC, snom and other technology participants, it has also had a major impact on the modernization of Peru itself. The expansion and modernization of the hospital and healthcare network was a major issue in the presidential elections of 2006, and the successful execution of the initiative has helped President Alan Garcia Perez fulfill his campaign promises. In fact, Garcia has personally inaugurated each new hospital and in one instance placed a test call to Jorge Lay Castro, Principal of SUMTEC using a snom 300 desktop phone.

In the end, EsSalud has been able to provide modern IP telephony and all its features to hundreds of locations using thousands of snom endpoints and bolstering Peru’s national infrastructure at the same time.

Some of the immediate benefits include:

- Easy provisioning of new lines, from central site or across branch locations;
- HD audio quality across the entire snom product line;
- Interoperable fail over from OCS to other environments in case of network disruption;
- Interoperability across many different SIP products.