4-page Case Study - Posted 7/17/2009

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National Oilwell Varco

Global Company Safeguards IM; Cuts Travel, Calling Costs with Communications Solution

National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is a global leader in the drilling industry, with 40,000 employees working in facilities across 49 countries. Employee use of public instant messaging (IM) networks resulted in repeated virus infections. The IT department blocked access to the IM networks, but users demanded access to this critical communications tool. When NOV looked for a solution, it found that Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 not only solved the IM problem but also provided many additional capabilities. Now, NOV is using Office Communications Server for presence integration with other applications and for audio, video, and Web conferencing. NOV reports that employees who use Microsoft Office Communicator travel less and have reduced international calling charges. They also report improvement with business processes, such as collaboration, hiring, and employee retention.

Situation

National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture, and sale of systems and components used in oil and gas drilling and production, as well as services to the upstream oil and gas industry. NOV has more than 40,000 employees working in facilities in 49 countries.

As a global company in a competitive market, NOV must meet the demands of customers across the world. Communications is a central component of NOV's success. At the end of 2007, the company provided employees with a variety of communications alternatives but typically let local offices choose the systems they wanted to use. “We were a very e-mail- and phone-centric company,” explains Alex Philips, IT Infrastructure Manager at NOV.

NOV had a centralized e-mail solution using Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. For voice services, each NOV location sourced its own phone equipment. The company had a variety of telephony systems that functioned well but generally were not interconnected or able to use call routing to minimize costs.

Other communications alternatives such as audio, video, and Web conferencing were handled by local offices or individual departments. Most groups used hosted Web conferencing services for use with their external customers, and audio conferencing bridges were typically outsourced by each office. Some locations had installed video conferencing systems, but they were not interconnected and tended to be underused because of their complexity.

Instant messaging (IM) and presence capabilities were not provided within the company, but many employees were using free Internet-based IM services. “If you named an IM application out there, we probably had it installed. Various groups within the company would use different IM clients,” explains Philips. “So we had some users that communicated with lots of other groups who had three and four different IM clients installed on their machines.”

Although not every application was centrally managed, the communications solutions functioned well for NOV. “We had a very good e-mail infrastructure with fast delivery times and great message hygiene that worked really well for us,” notes Philips. “With everyone’s phone numbers in the Global Address Book, it was also easy to call people either on their office or mobile phone. At the time, from the IT-department perspective, we felt we had a good communications infrastructure.”

The number of viruses circulating on public IM networks in 2007 prompted the company to re-evaluate its communications solutions. “We were constantly bombarded with every new virus that propagated via the public IM networks, and our antivirus program would only catch a virus after it was on the machine because the antivirus didn’t integrate with the IM clients,” explains Philips. When NOV responded to the virus infections by blocking access to the public IM networks, employees immediately demanded that IM access be restored. Although the IT department did not support IM, it had become a critical communications option for many employees. Allowing viruses to infiltrate the company’s computer systems was not an option, so the IT department started investigating other solutions.

NOV investigated many alternatives to providing IM and presence to employees. Public IM systems lacked a global address book and still had virus issues. Adding security to those public systems was possible but it was expensive, so NOV looked at enterprise systems including IBM Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. In that comparison, Office Communications Server proved to be the better system for NOV because of its integration with other applications NOV used and because of the many communications capabilities beyond IM and presence it offered. “When we looked at the licensing costs between Sametime and Office Communications Server, the decision was easy,” explains Philips. “We are able to buy the Microsoft products we need with the Enterprise CAL Suite at competitive pricing due to the bundling of other products that we wanted to utilize.”

Solution

NOV began testing Office Communications Server on an old sever that was configured in one afternoon. The initial user base was composed of 50 users within the IT department who each received the Microsoft Office Communicator client. The test group immediately saw the benefits of sending instant messages and viewing coworker availability. They later discovered how much more Office Communications Server had to offer. “We started discovering that Microsoft Office Communicator is more than just IM. We could actually talk to people computer to computer,” explains Philips. “Then we added webcams and were able to see people from the other side of the world, sometimes for the first time. We started playing with the Live Meeting client and doing Web conferences with all of IT.”

With Office Communications Server, we can send one person from the team to Dubai.… They can still function as a team for the meetings—but with a third of the travel cost. Scott Duff Vice President of Internal Audit, NOV

Because of the pilot’s popularity, the IT department was under pressure to deploy a production system. NOV worked with Microsoft Services to design and deploy their Office Communications Server solution. They deployed the servers at four data centers in the United States, Canada, Norway, and Singapore. The U.S. data center in Houston was completed first, in February 2008. NOV also deployed Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Office Communications Server to safeguard the environment from viruses. Forefront Security for Office Communications Server provided the additional benefit of enabling employees to share files with NOV employees even while outside of the corporate network.

After the Houston servers were deployed, NOV rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator and Office Live Meeting to users. NOV also deployed the Conferencing Add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook® to enable users to schedule meetings from within the Outlook messaging and collaboration client. The deployment was completed in June 2008.

Currently NOV has deployed IM, presence, and conferencing capabilities to more than 19,000 employees. NOV also has Microsoft Roundtable™ video conferencing devices at many of its offices.

Benefits

The deployment of Microsoft Office Communications Server at NOV has led to some dramatic changes in the way the company communicates, which was a great result for a project originally planned to provide a more secure instant messaging solution. As Philips says, “We started off just trying to solve IM, and Office Communications Server ended up solving a lot of our other problems. It seems like every day we find a new use for the software.” Beyond the benefits of instant messaging to speed communications, the presence information integrated into many applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Office SharePoint® Server helps NOV track a mobile workforce and find subject matter experts. The conferencing functions have led to reduced amount of travel and telephony costs, and have even facilitated new reporting structures within the company. “We installed Office Communications Server for all its great communications capabilities, not really for the cost savings. But now that the economy is horrible and everybody is trying to cut costs, our business groups are looking at Communicator and saying, ‘This is how we're going to achieve cost savings.’ And they can do it without cutting back on service.”

Reduced Travel

Teams at NOV are using the capabilities of Office Communications Server to reduce travel in many ways. In some cases, only one person from a team makes a trip instead of the entire team. “Sending three people from Houston to Dubai is a $30,000 to $50,000 travel cost. With Office Communications Server, we can send one person from the team to Dubai,” explains Scott Duff, Vice President of Internal Audit at NOV. “Their teammates can stay at the office and remain productive, and they can still function as a team for the meetings—but with a third of the travel cost.” Duff estimates that his team has reduced their planned travel by 25 percent, and the benefits go beyond cost savings. Duff adds, “As an example, a trip to Singapore, which we do frequently, takes one week to do two days of work. If you can do those two days of work without travelling, you also get three more days of work done.”

NOV can also avoid travel altogether with Web conferencing. Recently NOV used Roundtable devices to broadcast a board meeting with participants in China and the United States. Previously, the U.S.-based executives travelled to China four times a year for the meetings. NOV estimates that using Web conferencing for these meetings can save more than U.S.$100,000 per year.

Reduced International Calling Charges

NOV has dozens of international offices that stay in constant communication with the company headquarters in Houston. Many workers in these locations were making calls on their cell phones after work hours due to time zone differences. Philips explains his experience on a trip to Dubai early in the rollout, “A lot of these guys work from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. because they have to communicate with their customers in Dubai, and then they have to talk to the Houston headquarters in the evening. They are on the cell phone all evening long and they have five- or six-thousand-dollar cell phone bills. When they saw Communicator they said, ‘We have to have this now. We can see when someone in Houston gets in so we don’t have to wait to call them, and we can talk to them for free.’ I got them on the pilot as soon as I could.”

Employees have reduced their mobile phone charges while travelling as well. Duff explains, “On a trip to Dubai, I was able to do two-thirds of my communications on Communicator and the rest on my cell phone. I still had a $1,200 phone bill, but it would have been much larger. With Communicator, I can sit in my hotel room in Singapore, or wherever I am, and call whomever I need to call and not get these five-dollar-a-minute cell phone charges.”

Hiring and Retention

With the communications capabilities of Office Communications Server, employees in different offices can interact as if they were in the same place. NOV is taking advantage of this outcome to be more flexible in its hiring and retention of employees, resulting in a more skilled workforce. During the pilot, an employee in the Internal Audit department was about to resign because her spouse was relocated to another city. Instead, using Office Communicator allowed her to keep working. “We told her to keep doing her job, keep supervising the people you supervise ... just do it from California,” explains Duff. 

NOV also often needs employees with very specific talents and experiences. Finding the right employee is difficult, and getting the person to relocate can be even more difficult. With Office Communicator, managers at NOV can hire people without having to ask them to relocate.

As employees learn how to make the most of the solution and further integrate it into their business processes, NOV expects to achieve many additional benefits.
 

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about National Oilwell Varco (NOV) products and services, call (888) 262-8645 or visit the Web site at:
www.nov.com

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