Unified Communications Adopted in Parts by Many Companies

The Symphony IRI Group in Chicago takes a different direction for its UC. According to Steve Mueller, vice president of IT, the company has integrated Microsoft’s Office Communications Server with its Avaya Definity PBX, now upgraded to handle SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). One of the primary reasons for moving to the Microsoft option is its support for voice conferencing. “We had been paying an audio conferencing provider a not-insignificant amount for this audio conferencing service,” Mueller said. “We wanted to get off of the cost of this relationship except for investor calls where you may have a few thousand people.”

Mueller said that once they had Office Communications Server up and running, the company then supplemented the voicemail features of unified messaging. Meanwhile, the branch offices had their phones replaced with IP phones that are now running off the central Avaya switch, and are also linked to Communicator. Mueller said that once the change to UC was underway, it presented some challenges. “Moving to a VOIP [Voice over IP] infrastructure almost always requires a re-architecting of your infrastructure,” he said. “That probably means bandwidth, [quality of service], equipment upgrades, [power over Ethernet], rewiring or piggyback arrangements,” Mueller said.

Mueller also noted that his organization had to make some significant changes in the way they manage Microsoft Exchange. “Since the OCS unified messaging functions are all driven off Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, you have to make sure you enter information you probably ignored previously.” He said that includes phone numbers and extensions. “It has to be right when you move to Communicator because that’s your phone number now,” he explained. “There’s a separate entry in Active Director for your extension. It’s an entry that has to be made into the system. It uses the extension field as your ID when you log in.”

Mueller said since not everyone had an extension when they set up the UC system, they had to make up a few. He said while none of the problems with the move are beyond what he could manage, they still needed to be handled. “But from my observations of the industry, people will seriously under-think the amount of re-architecting involved.” Mueller said while he suspects it’s overkill, he has doubled the bandwidth to the company offices to handle the voice traffic.

Chris Farrer, meanwhile, has a completely different need when it comes to unified communications. Farrer is Telecommunications manager for Ritchie Bros. in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ritchie Bros. is the world’s largest auction house for industrial and heavy equipment and has offices around the world. For the company to be successful, it needed to tie its mobile sales force in locations ranging from Denver to Dubai with its internal phone system and with its internal e-mail system.

“The enterprise server is Avaya Enterprise communications Aura,” Farrer said. “We also use Avaya modular messaging and Lotus Notes as our e-mail component. We use applications based off those solutions. Mobility for us is BlackBerrys, which are tied to our PBX.” He said that voicemails, which are critical to the Ritchie Bros. remote staff, are actually stored in a Notes folder, and not sent as audio files to the users’ BlackBerrys. But since the users can’t tell the difference, their mobile storage needs are reduced, and the effectiveness is unchanged.

The result of tying the company’s PBX into a global network is that local calls are able to be routed through gateways and from there into the inboxes in offices around the world. Everyone has a local number in Vancouver, and they can dial each other as local calls, regardless of where they are in the world. Right now Richie Bros. doesn’t take advantage of the presence features of Lotus Sametime, and most of the instant messaging the company does uses BlackBerry Messenger.

Farrer said that the company is able to show ROI (return-on-investment} numbers in months instead of years. He also noted that UC had one unexpected benefit–during the Vancouver Olympics, the staff was able to avoid commuting and work from home.

Three companies, three different ways to use UC. As Infonetics analyst Matthias Machowinski pointed out in the beginning, UC can be whatever you wish it to be. For some, it means depending on instant messaging and presence, for others, it’s delivery of voice mail through your e-mail system. Or perhaps it’s combining e-mail, voice mail and a mobile work force. In each instance, UC has reduced cost, improved competitiveness, customer service and flexibility. In each case, the companies involved picked the functions they needed from the vast cafeteria of UC and used the tools they selected to make things work better for them.