From the December 2002
Issue
School finds fiber a better choice
SAN solution secures customer data
How one company reduced IT costs and improved productivity with a collaborative solution.
Doug Kandel was fed up with the costs and frustrations of outsourcing his company’s conferencing services. So he did what any good IT manager would do. He found a better way.
“At Datatec,” says Kandel, vice president of IT for the Fairfield, NJ, system integrator of large-scale technology implementations, “we relied on outsourced conferencing services from one of the major carriers to handle all our day-to-day conferencing, including weekly sales and sales-plan updates, and team project coordination.” The company’s customers include Fortune 1,000 companies and world-class technology providers.
The company’s geographically dispersed workforce requires close contact, coordination and communications traditionally conducted via conference call. Approximately 700 people, with nearly 200 sales, technical, administrative and project management associates, work from 10 branch locations across North America, with an additional 500 field service engineers (FSEs) constantly on the road.
“We’d call in conference details and schedule calls with the carrier’s conferencing call center to coordinate communications,” says Kandel. Because of the costs–$8,000 a month–Datatec prohibited ad hoc conferencing, with all conferencing centrally managed. This significant drawback eliminated spontaneous and collaborative discussions. According to Kandel, the company established an elaborate approval process designed to discourage all but the most essential conferences–saving money at the cost of productivity.
Productivity, costs impacted
Because the cost and inflexibility of its outsourced conferencing service was negatively impacting communication, Kandel evaluated a number of new technologies and services, searching for an affordable, effective alternative. He matched the features and capabilities the company encountered against its typical usage patterns–as well as against a growing “wish list” of new applications.
Part of the evaluation process included a disappointing trial with a card-based conference bridge that plugged into the company’s PBX. “The card-based system had no call-management features,” Kandel says, adding that serious concerns over security, capacity and call quality became apparent almost immediately upon initiating the trial.
“The card allowed only one conference at a time, had a single password for all users, and no quality-of-connection services,” Kandel explains. “Nor did it allow for adjustment of gain and volume levels, so a participant might sound a thousand miles away. The quality of the calls was abysmal. On top of all that, the card only had a maximum of eight ports.”
Datatec Systems wanted the ability to evaluate usage patterns. As with the outsourced service, the card-based conferencing bridge had no reporting capability. After reading in industry journals about Boston-based Sonexis, Kandel turned to its ConferenceManager, an integrated audio- and Web-conferencing platform.
Deployed by Datatec Systems as a rich media conferencing solution and as an automatic call distributor–an application it developed in-house with Sonexis management tools–ConferenceManager is Windows 2000/Intel-based customer premises equipment. This particular setup allows calls to be passed through the system, and conference participants to be queued quickly and efficiently in a virtual conference room.
“We had been looking into buying our own automatic call distributor that we priced at $100,000,” Kandel says. “We were now able to automate our conferencing processes, while creating customized call and conferencing applications, such as the automatic call distributor and virtual meeting space, introducing new efficiencies into our service procedures.
“Our previous system inhibited the collaborative level of communication we are experiencing,” Kandel adds. “Central management forced us to set up conferences several days in advance, and all conferences were managed by one person. Even with top-notch people on the job, it was a perilous approach.” With the configuration of ConferenceManager connected to Datatec’s Mitel corporate switch, no additional trunking is required, and calls are routed internally without any help from the company’s service provider.
roi of two months
Once the system was operational, Datatec Systems realized an immediate monthly cost savings of more than $6,700, resulting in a two-month payback period for the investment. Branch offices also take advantage of the system. By dialing into ConferenceManager and keying in the appropriate project code, participants have access to voice and multimedia conferencing, which the company uses to conduct sales and project meetings. But that is only half the story.
The virtual conference room enhances productivity for the company’s FSEs and works more efficiently than trying to schedule field conferences in advance, Kandel says. Company service protocol requires that FSEs call in to the home office upon arrival at a customer site in order to confer with the company’s service support network. FSEs are then connected to an account or service manager, as well as other technical staff who may be required to consult on a particular situation.
The problem was that FSE schedules are fluid. The necessities of on-site service would render an FSE’s schedule irreconcilable with prearranged conference schedules–perhaps made days in advance–or a party’s connection would drop out as a call-center operator attempted to reach and connect all scheduled participants.
Often, FSEs were placed on hold for a period of time before an operator could take their information. This inefficient practice gave to clients the appearance of unproductive FSEs. Datatec also paid for scheduled conference time that was not used, for conference time spent on hold, and for calls that were lost in process and never re-connected.
With the virtual meeting room–an open forum on the conference bridge setup for each open project–FSEs are collaborating and exchanging information and experiences that their colleagues can use, instead of spending time on hold waiting for a particular individual to join a call or an operator to complete a discussion with another FSE.
This was demonstrated recently when FSEs were performing data circuit hot cuts for a national account with a major insurance company. Staff discovered that certain server IP addresses, which were required in a file on the server, were not always present.
“One of our FSEs discovered a workaround and used the waiting room to relay his finding,” explains Kandel. “The information quickly propagated to all the FSEs as they checked in and out throughout the day. This saved countless site revisits and downtime.”
The management tools are displayed on the Sonexis Web management console and include a variety of call-management tools, such as a Web-accessible interactive voice recognition menu available during the call. This gives the call leader the ability to mute all calls, establish virtual private meeting rooms or public text-based chat. The reporting options give operations managers access to multiple levels of call data for use analysis.
“The solution allows reporting of all the call details,” Kandel says, “such as durations, average call length, call dispersion, time of day–it’s all there.
simple installation
“The beauty is how simple it is,” he adds. “We just plugged it in. The T-1 connection was plugged in from the PBX and a Web address was assigned to the unit. From there, we pointed our browser to the Web console and made sure the necessary telephony settings were established. Administration is fully Web-based and requires virtually zero overhead from our IT group, which is good because we have only three operational IT staffers to help run our network of area offices and the private IP network that connects them.”
The system comes standard with T-1 cards and 48-port capacity, upgradable to 96 ports, and includes PSTN, PBX, IP PBX and VoIP interfaces that allow it to easily integrate with any office environment. Scheduling and notification services, support for spontaneous and scheduled conferencing, and Microsoft Outlook support, are also featured, enabling contact management.
Specifically, Datatec Systems’ conference and collaboration network is made up of file servers running Netware 6.0 distributed throughout the United States at the company’s branch offices. The network is fully meshed, supporting any-to-any point communications, and multicast-enabled to support applications such as videoconferencing via netMeeting and USB webcam. The company’s own project management software tool suite, eDeploy, enables document sharing and project collaboration across the network.
“Communications have improved dramatically throughout the company,” Kandel says. “Because our people are spread throughout the country, we really rely on conferencing to bring our company together.”
Datatec Systems is also migrating to AT&T’s Integrated Network Connection Service (INCS), providing dynamic bandwidth allocation for the company’s voice and data services, which will further reduce the company’s per-minute conferencing costs.
“The performance advantages of the AT&T INCS infrastructure and dynamic bandwidth allocation are an ideal complement to ConferenceManager’s IP-based operation,” Kandel says. “INCS ensures sufficient throughput and quality of voice and data collaboration, a common drawback of traditional rich media conferencing systems.”
ConferenceManager’s openness also supports the move to INCS, and eliminates the need for Datatec Systems to invest in additional POTS service to support the voice capacity needed for the conferencing.
Kandel also notes that because the Sonexis box is premises-based rather than outsourced, field technicians are able to spend more time teleconferencing–at a significantly reduced cost than was possible with an outsourced conference service. Because the conferencing solution allows Datatec Systems to assign conference IDs, clients can be billed back for conference costs–dollars that Datatec was previously not able to recoup.
“The obvious cost savings reflected each month in our conferencing bill makes our CFO very happy, and that’s just when compared to our prior levels of usage,” says Kandel. “We save even more because the system is easy to use. We view the purchase as a strategic investment.
“Our organization lives and breathes cutting-edge technology, so we’re not afraid of looking ahead to what’s new,” Kandel adds. “We were an educated consumer making an educated decision to buy a necessary business tool. The results we’ve gotten and the response from the guys in the field tell us we made the right choice.”
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The Sonexis Story
Focused on delivering more cost-effective, secure and easier-to-use business conferencing solutions, Boston-based Sonexis Inc. is headed by President and CEO Dan Massiello, and an experienced management team with a track record of success in delivering innovative voice and data solutions. The company currently employs approximately 70 people.
Massiello brought the industry’s first commercially viable IP PBX–the NBX 100 Communication System–to market and spearheaded a successful corporate acquisition. Prior to joining Sonexis in April 2002, Massiello–a 30-year telecom industry management veteran–was vice president and general manager of the communications solutions division of 3Com, and president and CEO of NBX Corp., acquired by 3Com in 1999. His experience also includes executive positions at AT&T and Lucent.
Sonexis, founded in 1999, recently launched Conference Manager, a premises-based audio- and Web-conferencing platform designed to help organizations achieve goals faster, accelerate business productivity, and collapse end-to-end cycle times–with a rapid return on investment. Under Massiello’s direction, the privately held, venture-backed firm has implemented an aggressive marketing and distribution strategy to bring the product to market. As a result, it has been installed in dozens of corporate networks.