Business Continuity
Hosted VoIP/UC solution ensures business continuity
Financial firm realizes the value of communications as a service after a disaster renders the building uninhabitable.
Hurricane Katrina prompted many enterprises to re-evaluate their business continuity plans. In addition to the property damage and human suffering this widespread disaster brought to the Gulf Coast, many businesses struggled to survive when they were separated from their communications and information technology systems. Even businesses with remote data back-up storage systems that worked as planned found that their customers could not reach them by phone or even leave voice mails due to flooded or powerless PBX rooms.
A disaster as devastating as a hurricane is not necessary, however, to jeopardize businesses. On July 18, 2007, a steam pipe explosion in New York City near Grand Central Station caused the evacuation of several buildings in the area. Berkshire Capital Financial, a financial services firm specializing in financing commercial real estate, was one of the firms located in a building that was evacuated and uninhabitable for nearly a month.
Telephone service was also disrupted in the area. Employees, however, never lost touch with their customers or each other. "An affiliated company offered us temporary office space, so we moved about half our staff there the next day," says Nik Hakimian, operations manager at Berkshire Capital Financial.
The business continuity features of the Cypress Communications hosted VoIP and unified communications as a service solution, C4 IP, allowed the financial services company to continue with business as usual. "We simply plugged in our laptops and connected them to their LAN," he says. "We used our softphones to start calling customers and returning voice mails that were sent immediately after the explosion."
Using a softphone connected to the Internet, employees could make and receive calls just like they were sitting at their desks, with all the same features, like accounting codes and three-way calling. Other users were able to log onto a secure Web site to reroute incoming calls to their home phones.
"The rest of the staff worked from home using their DSL or cable access to the Internet and their softphones," says Hakimian. "We got our voice mail delivered via e-mail like always, and when customers called, they just rang through to our PCs. With our old PBX-based system, we would have been in serious trouble."
Cypress Communications manages the entire phone system, with quality of service managed across the LAN to the handset. The communications functions reside in the network rather than at the customer premise, so the network is always available, even if a customer's offices are destroyed.
At the desktop level, C4 IP integrates with Microsoft Outlook and allows users to connect, communicate, collaborate and continue. The solution provides access to click-to-call, instant messaging, video/audio/Web conferencing, find me/follow me, unified inbox and other unified communications applications.
"Frankly, it was Cypress' unified communications features like Microsoft Outlook integration, unified messaging and document sharing that we initially found most compelling," Hakimian explains. "After the explosion, I realized the true value of the service. In the three weeks we operated this way, we secured more than $500,000 in revenue that we would have otherwise lost."
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