The Asterisk (News - Alert) Company Digium, Inc. announced that Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has won the company’s Extreme Phone (News - Alert) Makeover contest. The winners will be honored with - a Switchvox Unified Communications system, the full-featured and cost-effective VoIP solution designed for small- to mid-sized businesses, and Polycom (News - Alert) SoundPoint IP phones. The complete system to be deployed is valued up to $10,000.

The Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg is an organization that assists youth of all backgrounds to develop self-esteem and character.

According to a press release, the Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg was selected by Digium (News - Alert) based on a solution that summarized the extreme limitations of organization’s 10-year-old phone system and lack of funding to upgrade their current system.

Currently, the organization cannot place calls between offices without interruption of service or afford to host conference calls for their board meetings.

According to Yvonne Hollins, executive director of Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg, the company’s phone system is critical to helping provide services to the youth and parents in its community.

“If a parent is trying to reach their child or our office, we want to make sure any one of our three offices can handle the call,” Hollins said. “And if a child is in need, we don’t want them to be placed into voicemail – we want to be able to respond to the call immediately.”

“Another reason we’re thrilled we won is because we needed a way for our Board of Directors to meet via monthly conference calls, but all of the options we considered before were cost prohibitive. With the Switchvox system, we’ll be able to manage conference calls without any additional charges, and we’ll save much more on our monthly communication expenses,” Hollins added.

As part of the prize, Digium will be offering the Extreme Phone Makeover for Boys and Girls Club - with key benefiting solutions such as ability to connect office workers at three remote office locations; on-demand conferencing capabilities to facilitate their office and Board of Directors to save money on travel time for monthly meetings; and  ability to see the location of callers on Google (News - Alert) Maps so that Boys and Girls Club can see which locations in their community generate the most incoming calls.

Apart from providing Polycom’s HD Voice technology for high-quality audio communications, Digium will be facilitating the Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg with other functionalities, such as call recording to assist in training new employees or volunteers; and integration between calls and other office communications, such as fax, call conferencing, web mashups, on demand reports and more, all displayed via web interface.

In addition, Digium will be offering the organization with access to call reports for each office, such as reports that indicate peak call times and full data on all calls.

According to the release, Anteil Inc., an authorized Digium reseller, will be assisting with the network assessment and installation of Digium's Switchvox SMB system and Polycom IP phones in the organization.

Tim Yankey, senior director of product marketing at Polycom, said, “The combination of Polycom phones and Digium’s Switchvox system is going to help Boys and Girls Club completely transform the quality of their communications. We look forward to helping this deserving winner and other small businesses save money and improve their productivity by upgrading their phone systems.”

Digium and Polycom both are extending the Extreme Phone Makeover contest through June 11, 2010, in order to assist other companies who are in need to improve their business communications.