Features

AND 1, the basketball footwear and apparel company recently acquired by American Sporting Goods, has more than 20% of players in the National Basketball Association wearing AND 1 gear. The company, headquartered in Paoli, Pa., with offices in Portland, Ore., Dongguan City, China, Taipei, Taiwan, and Amsterdam, runs the AND 1 Mix Tape Tour, featuring the nation’s top street basketball players.

Up until mid-2004, AND 1 was using an analog phone system that was costly to repair, unreliable and difficult to manage. In addition, the legacy system was not compatible with Microsoft Exchange 2000, to which AND 1 was upgrading, so the company decided it was time to make a change. To upgrade its system to be compatible with Exchange 2000 would have cost the company upwards of $80,000.

“When we heard that the cost of upgrading the system was that high, we were shocked,” says Adam Resnick, manager of network operations for AND 1. “We called on ITI to help us investigate VoIP solutions.”

Interchange Technologies (ITI), AND 1’s technology integration partner, was working with the company on its new IP-based videoconferencing system. “ITI showed their capabilities with our video conferencing system, so they were our first logical stop for voice over IP,” says Resnick.

The VoIP choices came down to four equipment manufacturers. After speaking with several ShoreTel customers and hearing references, AND 1 decided on a new ShoreTel system, which cost approximately $40,000.

The first step of a rigorous implementation strategy was to create a detailed and thorough plan, including an analysis of the network load. Second, ITI worked to determine exactly what needed to be rolled out (e.g., how many users, extensions, voice mailboxes). Then the company could start taking delivery on and setting up the equipment without impacting the existing system. Finally, the telephone lines and ShorePhones were connected, and the system went live.

ITI provided AND 1 with more than 170 ShoreTel ShorePhone IP phones, as well as analog phones, that capitalize on AND 1’s existing copper infrastructure. Seven ShoreGear-120/24 switches, which each support up to 120 IP phones or up to 24 analog ports, reside in AND 1’s Paoli building and two more are deployed at the Portland location.

A ShoreTel ShoreGear-T1 provides high-density trunking to AND 1’s central office, and ShoreTel SoftPhones give users the ability to turn their laptops into VoIP phones from home or from the road. AND 1 offers Plantronics headsets to those employees who utilize SoftPhones frequently and prefer a headset over their laptop’s microphone and speakers.

ShoreWare Director, ShoreTel’s browser-based management interface, allows AND 1 to manage every site and feature of the system, including the PBX, voice mail, automated attendant and desktop applications. When a new user is added, the centralized database is automatically updated, every switch is notified, a mailbox is created, and the automated attendant dial-by-name-and-number feature and online directories are all updated within seconds.

AND 1 is using a Dell server running Windows 2000 as its voice mail server. This acts as the company’s interface to ShoreTel’s Personal Call Manager, which is the network client that integrates the phone system with Outlook on the desktop.

“With ShoreTel Personal Call Manager, our employees can make calls right from Microsoft Outlook with a simple mouse click, which is far quicker than the traditional dialing method,” Resnick explains. “They can also send a voice mail through e-mail, change their phone settings and retrieve voice mail messages right from Call Manager. Our receptionists can see who’s on the phone before they transfer a call, so nobody gets dumped into a voice mail unnecessarily, and if a live person is available, that’s where the call gets routed.”

AND 1 runs VoIP over a virtual private network between its Oregon and Pennsylvania locations, saving itself about $12,000 a year on dedicated point-to-point connections. In addition, Resnick’s team no longer needs to dedicate as much time to supporting the telephone needs of AND 1 employees as it had to in the past.

“When a user moves, it takes five seconds to reconfigure a switch from the console and you’re done, as opposed to ripping out cabling and physically moving the phone,” says Resnick. “From a phone standpoint, office re-organizations take about 75% less time, not to mention the ability for employees to take their office phones to a conference room on a day-to-day basis. The less time network operations staff spends on these things, the more time we have to be working on more strategic issues.”

As of July, AND 1 had 190 users in Paoli and Portland on the system. The old system gave AND 1 end-users little administration control, while ShoreWare Director and Call Manager are important self-service tools. “From a systems administrator standpoint, the ShoreWare Director dwarfs the previous system,” offers Resnick. The old system involved a cryptic graphic interface, which was a standalone application, connected to the phone system by a modem, whereas the ShoreWare Director is a secure Web interface, accessible from any PC in the company.

Another benefit over the old system is the footprint size of the ShoreTel gear. The old system took up half a wall in the server room. The new phone equipment takes up a third of a standard rack.

At some point in the future, AND 1 would like to deploy the ShoreTel system to its Taiwan and China offices, bringing VoIP to all of its offices and allowing management of the entire system from the Paoli operations center. “VoIP in the Asia-Pacific offices would let us make calls halfway around the world with no added cost,” says Resnick. “The IP switches could communicate over our existing WAN connections. The cost savings would be tremendous.”

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Samantha Leggat is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.