IBM phone contract voted down at city spending board meeting

On Wednesday, Baltimore City’s spending board voted 3-2 against approving a Voice over Internet Protocol phone contract for IBM, just one day after the Baltimore Sun reported that while the city comptroller’s office was taking proposals for upgrading the city’s government’s phone system, the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology was spending roughly $500,000 for such a VoIP upgrade.

The mayor’s technology office purchased Cisco equipment — the 124 switches, 80 VoIP phones, including some with video touch screens, and other items — on May 23 and June 13, 2011, city records show. The June purchase order listed other equipment that would be needed to complete the transition to a VoIP system, including “a small number of additional switches.”
Meanwhile, bids for the phone project were due to [Comptroller Joan M.] Pratt’s office on May 25, 2011. [more]

According to the Baltimore Sun, Pratt had wanted to award a phone system contract worth $7.4 million to IBM. She and “Simon Etta, acting chief of the Municipal Telephone Exchange, say the contract with IBM would save the city $23 million over 12 years compared with the current system.”
Read more at the Baltimore Sun.