Gerrie Electric Unites

As fundamental as the phone is for business communication, it is fast becoming just one tool in an organization's arsenal. Changing technologies are broadening how communications are defined. The functionality available today is staggering, and the telephone isn't the foundation it once was.

Users can quickly locate the right person and engage in a text messaging session, escalate the session to a voice call, or a video call - all within just a few minutes. It is a new approach, a way of utilizing an organization's communications platform to help a business accelerate and enhance results with less cost, while contributing to a smaller environmental footprint. This technology falls under the umbrella of Unified Communications (UC).

Gerrie Electric is a Canadian-owned company with seventeen branches in Ontario. It has grown to be one of the largest independent electrical distributors. It has 300 employees - all supported by a four member IT team.

Greg Patchev, IT Manager for Gerrie, was shopping for a new PBX when he discovered Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS). "This product came out of nowhere," he says. "We became interested in OCS for the presence portion and the Live Meeting components as tools we could leverage for sales." OCS, the cornerstone of Microsoft's Unified Communications platform, offers presence awareness, instant messaging, conferencing and enterprise voice across many devices and applications. It does all of this under one identity, thus increasing security and manageability from the IT perspective.

"It's nice to manage one user account and have it spread to all aspects of the company," says Patchev. "It's what allows us to manage 300 people from one location. Unified Communications helps cut through the typical administrative bottleneck."

It also integrates well with programs across the 2007 Microsoft Office system - including Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Groove, and SharePoint Server- giving information workers many different ways to communicate with each other with a consistent and simple user experience.

Quickly it became apparent to the Gerrie team that what they knew was the tip of the iceberg, and that it was worth further investigation.

Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst, COMMfusion, says Patchev and his team did the right thing: the extensive UC capabilities offered by Microsoft mean that an organization should fully research the product set to find the right fit.

"Each situation is unique," she says. "A Microsoft UC implementation can be seamless and easy, but you need to know the environment, and who is doing the implementation. How familiar is the customer with the different technologies involved? It isn't always plug-and-play. It may take some work, and for that you need the right people."

Usually people are drawn to the solution because legacy gear has limited capabilities. This may or may not require a rip-and-replace of the old PBX.

"Often enterprise PBXs work fine," says Pleasant. "They are reliable and scalable, though they lack flexibility."

Pleasant says that it depends on the use case: How many people are in the organization, and what business processes do the applications need to support? Administering network/VPN permissions, e-mail, conference bridges, voice mail and security cards (to name a few), can make it challenging for even a large IT department to keep up.

"For a large enterprise I would say use OCS side-by-side with the existing PBX. Large companies like Intel, Sprint - and of course Microsoft itself - use OCS exclusively, but I see exclusive use as ideally suited to the mid-market and for smaller businesses."

In short, as with any implementation, the more complex the environment, and the bigger the enterprise, the greater the need for due diligence. However, as the example of Gerrie Electric shows, the value of a reliable and scalable legacy PBX can be lost when its inflexibility is such that it becomes an inhibitor.

"Before the UC roll-out every branch had its own phone system," says Patchev, "and head office was the only one with voice mail. Just getting people to service the hardware was a challenge too because a lot of it was so old - ten years in some cases." Suddenly, that reliable old phone system begins to look more like a jalopy.

"Just adding a line or moving a phone had become time consuming and costly," adds Patchev. "Different systems even required different service vendors."

As a sales-focused organization that relies on voice communication to drive the business, Gerrie had to address the need for change.

"People would call in and want to place an order, and if you were busy at the counter or couldn't take that call you would essentially lose that sale," says Patchev.

In addition, head office was managing two voice mail systems - cellular and the legacy PBX. This inefficiency left too much room for missed business. Gerrie found that their deployment was possible without a rip and replace implementation. It works side-by-side with their current system, lending its added functionality without straining their user community with dramatic change.

"Exchange can handle the voicemail," says Pleasant, "and it can also provide the unified messaging service. If you want to do this and keep a legacy PBX you'll need a mediation server; essentially, a gateway to deal with the existing PBX."

Patchev took a cautious, well-reasoned approach to the implementation - "We started out running it in IT just to see if it would work," he says. "We sent it out to a couple of branches to find what the load on the network would be, then we sent it out to our trainer. After that we sent it to about 10 people for about a week or two. Then we did the full roll-out to the entire company." Gerrie benefitted from Microsoft's extensible communications platform that works with an organization's existing messaging and telephony infrastructure, adapting to changing business needs. The implementation has resulted in the complete integration of the entire organization's communication silos; if one channel cannot reach you, another channel will. This helps reduce response times and increases the ability to deal with every customer contact in real time.

In addition, cost efficiency is a major priority for any successful business.

"In the past the outside sales force had the pain of being in the office and using a cell phone, which people frowned upon because you're using cellular minutes, you're actually wasting money," says Patchev.

And because many reps worked remotely from home, there was additional onus on them to reduce costs associated with the business.

"When the sales force found out that with the new solution they could simply use their laptop microphone and speakers, punch in the number and make the call to whoever they wanted - they ran with that," he says.

A surprise benefit that evolved from the deployment - and, according to Patchev, "the best bang for the buck" - was how it changed Gerrie's ability to respond to support issues. Patchev offers a compelling example of OCS as a support tool for a distributed workforce:

"Let's say a user is out at a branch and they have a problem. They start calling training to see if they are doing this procedure properly. If it's a technology issue, then IT has to get involved. We simply have a conference, get everybody in Live Meeting address the problem in real time."

This is a perfect example of how the technology improves communication and user and team productivity. It's easy from here to see how this kind of support and functionality could also shorten sales cycle times, resolve customer issues faster, and reduce travel time. With Office Live Meeting 2007 Gerrie Electric can integrate audio, video and media, chat, slide and application sharing, as well as VoIP.

If change seems daunting but necessary, it's always a good idea to ask for advice form a third party. Fortunately the Microsoft partner community is building up its OCS practice.

"Systems integrators can be key here," says Pleasant. "But it's important for them to understand a company's business processes and applications." Gerrie's experience highlights the benefits of managing all real-time synchronous devices from one central location. This frees IT resources and allows them to go beyond a labour intensive support role. More productivity contributes to a stronger cost of ownership and helps Gerrie get more value out of the IT spend.