HP Case Study: UC Pays Off For IT Consultancy

10 Jun 2014

We all know that there are many different use cases within different vertical markets for exploiting the benefits of UC. UC is particularly beneficial wherever end users are remote and mobile, but still need to easily communicate with each other and collaborate by exchanging information asynchronously or in real time.

IT consulting organization, Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS), an HP Elite Partner, needed to upgrade its 18-year-old inefficient and costly telephony and voicemail system that used old analog T-1 PRI circuits, which were getting more difficult to maintain. ECS was already using an HP data infrastructure for its application servers, data storage, and data management tools, but when it came to real-time communications for its staff and enterprise clients, they were using outdated equipment. Most importantly, they needed to support both their mobile staff and remote customer clients with new, simplified, and flexible real-time conferencing and messaging capabilities.

"We needed a proven solution to replace our legacy voice and voicemail system that would ensure our customer communication would continue without disruption," said Chief Technology Officer John Foley. "We also wanted to provide our employees with additional capabilities not present in our traditional phone system."

The UC Solution on a Microsoft/HP Platform

The core replacement target was a new, IP telephony-based phone system. ECS first looked at traditional telephony provider offerings, but found them to be both expensive and lacking in functionality. ECS then looked at the HP Unified Communication solution offering that merges HP's Converged Infrastructure for servers, data storage, and networking resources, with Microsoft Lync.

With Lync, workers can communicate securely anywhere they have reliable HP networking connectivity, using whatever Lync-approved device they prefer. Lync unifies voice, video calls, Web conferencing, presence management, and instant messaging in one client, making it simple to switch between different forms of communication.

Payoff Of HP/Lync Solution - Better Service Performance at Lower Costs

According to ECS, "The new communications system simplifies how everyone at ECS works." Frequently on the road, instead of punching in long conference line data Foley hits "join now" on his smartphone application for fast connections to ECS-branded conferences. At customer sites, he uses his HP Spectre Notebook PC for Web Conferencing and Instant Messaging. Foley notes that the HP Unified Communication solution improves client service and enhances internal collaboration - all at a cost of less than half the previous service, and that ECS expects to achieve Return on Investment (ROI) in less than two years.

"We were able to add capacity to our existing HP Converged Infrastructure to accommodate the new Lync environment. This simple expansion of our virtual environment had the added benefit of providing for a highly available telephony solution. We then could collapse our separate voice and data networks into a single-provider network that provided us with a lower cost solution to meet our overall communications requirements," Foley said. "Our team is rarely in the office together during the day. The HP and Microsoft Unified Communications solution allows us to collaborate very effectively whether in the office, mobile or remote."

Read the full case study here.


This paper is sponsored by HP.

Comments

There are currently no comments on this article.

You must be a registered user to make comments

Related Vendors