Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Infrastructure topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Greenwich plans cloud phone rollout, fiber ring and modest capital storage purchase to improve resilience
Summary
IT leaders told the committee the town will replace an aging phone system with a cloud-hosted service that adds mobile "follow me" capability, complete a fiber optic ring to bolster resilience for police and emergency operations, and buy additional storage to address growing data-retention demands.
Town IT officials described three near-term infrastructure projects that are shaping the department’s FY27 budget: a phased phone-system replacement, completion of a fiber ring to improve resilience between municipal buildings and the safety complex, and a one-off capital purchase for additional storage.
Tom Klein and Matt Santa said the phone replacement moves the town from an on-premises PBX to a cloud-hosted model that shifts some costs from maintenance to subscription and licensing. The new system will support soft-phone apps so staff can receive their office extension on laptops and mobile devices using a "follow me" or "find me" feature. Matt said the budget showed a higher request on the maintenance/building-supplies line to reflect cloud licensing and SIP-trunk changes, and that costs should become clearer after the system is installed.
Klein said a vendor was selected and an award letter had gone to legal; the rollout will be phased, with libraries and the safety complex among early targets and townwide and police deployments planned for July. The contract and final pricing remain subject to the legal review and final award.
On network resilience, Klein said conduits are in and fiber is being installed to create a roughly 32-node ring between this building and the safety complex; the ring provides redundancy so a single cut is routed around while multiple breaks can segment the ring. He noted that police dispatch and the emergency operations center will be prioritized for failover connectivity.
The FY27 capital request included $50,000 for general infrastructure upkeep (network switches, Wi‑Fi access points) and a separate one-off storage purchase to expand an array of disks. Klein said retention rules from the state and growing document/email volume drive storage needs; he described ongoing work to classify data and the prospect of AI-assisted tools in the future to identify deletable content, but he said such tools are not yet ready for broad municipal deployment.
Officials told the committee they had used RFPs to estimate phone costs and were aiming to 'right size' the budget entry; they expected some efficiencies post-deployment but acknowledged subscription models are likely to leave baseline costs higher than current on‑prem licensing.
Next steps include finalizing the phone contract through legal, continuing fiber installation, and beginning the agreed capital storage purchase; officials said they will report clearer licensing numbers after deployment and will monitor run rates for future budgets.
