Cover Story
Global Overhaul
Neeraj
Rajpal, CIO at law firm Bryan Cave, realized
his distributed communications network was
architecturally challenged.
When Neeraj Rajpal, chief information
officer of law firm Bryan Cave LLP, first
realized the company's distributed
communications infrastructure needed an
overhaul, each of the firm's offices
maintained its own telephony, application
and messaging infrastructure. "It was
definitely an administrative and support
challenge," he says. "We had a number of
disparate models of Avaya and Nortel
products deployed globally. Maintaining all
these systems was both difficult and
costly."
In addition, Bryan Cave's computing
architecture needed to be updated to ensure
business continuity and disaster recovery.
"When California was experiencing brownouts,
we often lost entire offices," Rajpal
remembers. "In the aftermath of September
11, our lawyers were worried about what
might happen in the case of another serious
disaster. In today's marketplace, downtime
is simply not an option."
Bryan Cave represents a wide variety of
business, financial, institutional and
individual clients, including publicly held
multinational corporations, large and
midsized privately held companies,
partnerships and emerging companies. Aided
by extensive investments in technology,
Bryan Cave's more than 1,000 lawyers and
consulting professionals in 22 offices
across the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Asia,
serve clients' needs in the world's leading
business and financial markets.
In addition to overcoming the challenges
of its architecture, Bryan Cave was looking
to embrace a new vision for unified
communications. "Because of our emphasis on
client focus, our employees often work out
of their home offices, hotels and client
locations," Rajpal explains. "We needed to
better enable communication and
collaboration between our employees
anywhere, at any time."
Many Bryan Cave attorneys also wanted to
receive voice mail on their desktops in the
same way they already received e-mail and
fax messages. A unified messaging solution
would enable the attorneys to improve their
responsiveness to clients.
"What most people don't
initially consider is that the number
one business application is still voice,
people speaking to people."
Rajpal decided to implement a regional
data center model. Data centers were built
in Dayton, Ohio, and Dublin, Ireland, (with
plans in place to add another data center in
Hong Kong) to serve the needs of North
American, European and Asian offices,
respectively. The data centers were each
built to offer services in four areas: data
and applications, messaging, Internet
access, and telephony, with service
provisions for disaster recovery and
business continuity.
Bryan Cave selected Cisco Systems to
provide a complete unified communications
solution. "We wanted to leverage one vendor
with a mature, broad solution suite and a
single support umbrella. We had extensive
plans for how we wanted to build our
infrastructure, and Cisco turned out to be a
good fit for Bryan Cave," Rajpal says.
In each data center, the firm built a
Cisco Unified Communications Manager and
associated Cisco Unity clusters. Fidelus
Technologies (a company specializing in
global unified communications solutions for
the legal market) assessed the environment
and designed a unified communications
solution to meet the key requirements of
disaster avoidance, centralization,
simplified management, interoffice
communications continuity, mobility and
enhanced productivity; it also laid the
groundwork for Bryan Cave to expand feature
sets without a complete redesign.
Cisco Unified Communications was
leveraged by integrating Cisco Unity
messaging technologies with Bryan Cave's
e-mail platform within the regionalized data
centers, replacing the traditional voice
mail systems in each office. Like other
Cisco Unified Communications customers,
Bryan Cave was able to reduce costs by
sharing a single platform and consolidating
support and hardware resources among
multiple sites.
While the users at Bryan Cave generally
adapted quickly to the new communications
and messaging systems, the decision to
implement a consistent messaging retention
policy posed some challenges. Previously,
Bryan Cave had no policy regarding how long
e-mail and voice-mail messages were
retained. Many employees simply kept all
their e-mail forever.
"This was a great opportunity to revisit
the firm's e-mail and voice-mail retention
policies," Rajpal says. "The firm decided on
a 60-day retention policy throughout the
company, and although we communicated these
changes, modifications like these take time
to accept. Users now seem to be adapting
well."
A significant percentage of Bryan Cave
attorneys work in locations other than a
traditional office. Some practice in states
without local Bryan Cave offices and work
remotely all the time. Other attorneys
simply prefer to work from home by day, and
others opt to work at home in the evening
rather than remain in the office into the
night. Providing 24/7 access to voice and
messaging services from any location was
critical.
In the past, attorneys had to call into
the voice-mail system frequently to check
messages. Now, everything is at their
fingertips, with all communications
(e-mail, faxes and voice mail) showing up in
the e-mail client. Additionally, those who
have a Cisco Unified IP phone in their homes
can make and receive calls as if they were
in the office.
Newer mobile devices allow playback of
Cisco Unity voice messages straight from the
device without users having to call into the
system. "We've been waiting a long time for
this feature, which has a clear impact on
productivity and responsiveness," Rajpal
says. Web clients, other desktop clients and
enhanced mobile capabilities for more basic
mobile phones are also part of the Cisco
Unity solution, meaning Bryan Cave attorneys
are always able to collaborate.
Several other new unified communications
features benefit remote workers. The latest
version of Cisco's Unified Communications
Manager includes single number reach (SNR).
This allows a user to program alternate
numbers, such as a mobile or home phone
number, to ring at the same time as an
office line. When Bryan Cave attorneys use
this feature, they no longer need to give
out a mobile phone number, as the mobile
device will ring simultaneously with the
desk phone. To the caller, the attorney's
location is completely transparent. With a
single contact number, callers have to make
fewer attempts to contact their attorney,
which allows quicker decision making.
SNR also solves a message repository
challenge. A common behavior of callers is
to leave a message on the office voice-mail
system before trying to contact the attorney
on a mobile phone, then potentially having
to leave a message there, as well. Not only
does calling multiple numbers and leaving
multiple messages waste a client's time, but
the attorney has to retrieve messages from
each location. Now, if the secondary or
tertiary devices do not answer, the call is
pulled back to the Cisco Unity system, thus
eliminating the annoyance of receiving the
same message in multiple locations.
"The technology industry spent over a
decade provisioning applications for remote
access," Rajpal explains. "Our attorneys
have been able to access almost any
application remotely for years. Whether the
application is simple like e-mail or a more
complex application that we publish
leveraging the Citrix platform, we are able
to provide our users with remote access to
them.
"What most people don't initially
consider is that the number one business
application is still voice, people speaking
to people. Even with all the effort that had
been expended making the computing platform
mobile, voice was the only application that
tethered users to their offices," he adds.
By adopting elements of the Cisco Unified
Communications system, including Cisco
Unified Communications Manager and Cisco
Unity, Rajpal says that this new era of
location independence will not only have a
positive impact on both internal and
external communication, but also improve the
quality of life for the firm's attorneys.
The changes Bryan Cave made through this
migration were only the first step in the
company's long-term plans. "Essentially, we
are moving to an 'office in a box,' where an
attorney can set up a home office with
minimal support from IT staff. The work
experience inside the office or in a remote
location should be identical, while
maintaining our strict security policies,"
Rajpal says. "We have overcome this
remote-office challenge by piloting Cisco's
ASA firewall device, which simply plugs into
a cable modem or DSL connection and is
preconfigured by our staff to provide a
highly secure VPN tunnel into our
infrastructure."
As the office-in-a-box concept is
piloted, Bryan Cave is also planning to add
additional capabilities to its unified
communications solution. Rajpal is in the
process of upgrading the foundation to Cisco
Unified Communications Manager 6.0 and Cisco
Unity 5.0 (from the current version 4.2) to
take advantage of the new capabilities that
will help better serve remote and mobile
workers. In addition, the firm is in the
early phases of evaluating Cisco Unified
Presence and Cisco Unified Personal
Communicator to give the company's employees
a tool for communicating more easily while
at home.
"Our employees would like one place where
they can see their messages, see if the
person who left the message is available,
and then call or instant message them, no
matter what device they are using at the
time," Rajpal says.
By continuing to build on its
existing foundation and rolling out more
of the applications, Rajpal hopes to
offer even more streamlined
collaboration options for its attorneys.
By continuing to build on its existing
foundation and rolling out more of the Cisco
Unified Communications applications, Rajpal
hopes to offer even more streamlined
collaboration options for its attorneys. "We
also see the office in a box as a way to
rapidly deploy attorneys to new locations as
our clients require a Bryan Cave presence,"
he says. "We can literally respond to a
client requirement overnight if needed."
In recent years, Bryan Cave has been
expanding quickly. "We've been in
merger-and-acquisition mode for a number of
years now. We have been bringing a number of
new offices online, all over the world. In
the past, this was always a huge challenge,"
Rajpal offers. "It often took between three
and six months to get the communications
infrastructure up and running, typically
even longer in Asia." Trying to procure and
configure the systems in each new office
required a lengthy process, as well as
extensive, costly travel of IT staff to each
new location.
Since centralizing its infrastructure and
deploying Cisco Unified Communications,
Bryan Cave has been able to substantially
reduce the amount of time it takes the firm
to open a new office. "We recently opened
new offices in Milan, Italy, and Hamburg,
Germany," Rajpal says.
"While circuit provisioning still takes a
fair amount of time, the installation and
configuration of a data and voice service
takes only a few weeks. Once it's up and
running, we then manage and support the site
from a single regional location. A
centralized regional model makes it much
easier for the IT staff to manage, and it
significantly reduces travel costs for the
firm."
In the end, Rajpal says the decision to
employ such a radically new infrastructure
will allow the company to deepen its
relationships with its clients. A client
will be able to work with the contact
attorney when needed. Bryan Cave expects
this capability to strengthen an already
strong client loyalty.
About Cisco Systems
John Chambers
Founded in 1984 by a small group of
computer scientists from Stanford
University, Cisco Systems designs,
manufactures and sells IP-based networking
products and technologies. Headquartered in
San Jose, Calif., the company has more than
63,050 employees worldwide, providing
products and solutions in the company's core
development areas of routing and switching,
as well as in advanced technologies such as
application networking, digital media,
mobility, storage, unified communications,
data centers, security, telepresence and
video.
John Chambers is chairman and CEO of
Cisco. Since January 1995, when he assumed
the role of CEO, Chambers has grown the
company from $1.2 billion in annual revenues
to approximately $35 billion. In November
2006, he was named chairman of the board.
Chambers joined Cisco in 1991 as senior vice
president, worldwide sales and operations.
Prior to joining Cisco, he spent eight years
at Wang Laboratories and six years with IBM.
He holds a law degree and Bachelor of
Science/Bachelor of Arts degrees from West
Virginia University. He also received a
master's degree in business administration
from Indiana University.
For more information
(click here)