Yapı Kredi, the first national private bank of Turkey, is a leader in setting standards for the Turkish banking sector through the introduction of new products and services. To help employees communicate and collaborate, the bank had deployed a Microsoft communications solution to provide presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and enterprise voice capabilities. In November 2010, Yapi Kredi extended those capabilities by deploying Microsoft Lync Server 2010. The bank wanted to take advantage of a more flexible architecture that will enable it to expand enterprise voice, provide redundancy in case of network failure or disaster, and help to increase employee efficiency.


Situation
Yapi Kredi, the first nationwide bank in Turkey, is the country’s fourth largest private bank, with about 6 million active customers. With interests in a variety of financial services and products, including pension fund management, credit cards, commercial leases, insurance policies, and brokerage services, Yapi Kredi had total assets under management of about 82.3 billion Turkish lira (U.S.$57.6 billion) at the first half of 2010. Headquartered in Istanbul, Yapı Kredi continues to grow, with more than 17,000 employees and 838 branches and group subsidiaries.

Yapi Kredi has continually invested in communications and collaboration solutions for its employees, who are dispersed across Turkey and throughout Europe, to help them be more productive at their jobs. For messaging, the company deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. To share information and collaborate on documents, employees use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. For real-time communications, Yapi Kredi deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to provide presence, instant messaging (IM), conferencing, and desktop sharing capabilities for 15,500 employees. It also enabled enterprise voice capabilities for 4,000 employees at its headquarters in Istanbul. It implemented Exchange Unified Messaging so that these employees can receive and manage voice mail through the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client. Other employees use analog voice service provided through an Ericsson private-branch exchange (PBX).

The Office Communications Server deployment consists of two front-end servers behind a load balancer, along with two audio/visual (AV) conferencing servers, and one back-end database server. It also includes an edge server, which provides access for mobile and remote users as well as connectivity to public IM systems like Windows Live Messenger.

Lync Server was easy for us to deploy, and with all the capabilities available through one client, our employees have a better user experience. We also expect it will help us reduce costs. Ali Serhan Çetin Senior Systems Administrator, Yapi Kredi

It also colocated its Monitoring and Archiving servers on the same server computer. The Monitoring server collects call detail reports (CDRs); usage information related to voice over IP (VoIP) calls; IM messages, audio and video conversations, meetings, application sharing, and file transfers; numerical data describing the media quality on the network and endpoints; and call error and troubleshooting information for failed calls. Yapi Kredi can use these reports to track usage and to troubleshoot issues. Because the Monitoring server captures end-to-end call quality information, it can also use reports to identify potential problems with network equipment and services. Yapi Kredi uses a Dialogic Media Gateway 2000 to connect Office Communications Server to the public switched telephone network through the PBX.

To help increase employee efficiency and help reduce costs, the company has started an initiative called “No Desk Phone” for its 1,000 mobile employees. Because mobile employees travel between offices much of the time, they are not available to answer calls on their desk phones. Yapi Kredi decided to remove the desk phones for these employees and instead route their calls through the PBX to Office Communications Server. Now, when these employees receive a call, it comes directly through Microsoft Office Communicator on their laptop computers. If an employee is not available to answer, the call goes to voice mail and the messages appear in employee’s Outlook inbox.

Employees at branch offices have access to IP-based voice capabilities for audio conferencing through Office Communications Server. For web conferencing, the company uses Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007, which has helped it to decrease travel and reduce costs for both travel and third-party conferencing services. It also uses Live Meeting to record training sessions for new employees, so they can easily access the videos at their convenience.

To further increase employee efficiency and encourage collaboration, Yapi Kredi has implemented federation so that employees can connect to technical partners, bank subsidiaries, and shareholders. They can see presence and calendar information for federated colleagues and easily connect with them through instant messaging and voice calls. So that employees can communicate easily with partners and customers who do not use Office Communications Server, the bank enabled communication with public instant messaging clients. Employees at Yapi Kredi also rely on the group chat feature in Office Communications Server, which they can use to have topic-based, multiparty discussions that persist over time and are maintained on the server so that teams in different locations or departments can review discussions even when they are online at different times.

Yapi Kredi took advantage of the application programming interfaces in Office Communications Server to create an application it calls the Interactive Bot to deliver important technical notices to employees. Before, the IT team relied on email to send technical notices, but employees often did not see the messages. With this Interactive Bot, the IT team can send a pop-up IM to notify employees about important updates or service outages. It can send the messages to the whole company or it can select groups through the Active Directory service. This helps to ensure that employees do not miss critical updates and service notices that might affect their productivity.

The bank wanted to extend enterprise voice and unified messaging capabilities to more of its employees, including those who work at branch offices. It also wanted to increase the number of employees who use conferencing, to further reduce travel and costs. In addition, because bank employees rely so much on Office Communications Server to communicate and collaborate, Yapi Kredi wanted a better way to ensure the availability of the service.

Solution
To take advantage of a more flexible architecture that would provide redundancy and help it extend enterprise voice capabilities, Yapi Kredi decided to upgrade its communications solution by deploying Microsoft Lync Server 2010. Lync Server provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—as well as improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools. The bank began its deployment for 15,500 employees in November 2010, and it expects to complete the deployment by April 2011.

Yapi Kredi deployed Lync Server 2010 in a virtual environment, which will help it reduce the amount of required hardware and make it easier to perform maintenance to the system without interruption. Yapi Kredi is also planning to deploy Lync Server at a disaster recovery site with automatic failover to prevent service interruptions. To plan its Lync Server configuration, Yapi Kredi used the Topology Builder to define all the parameters required for the installation. Topology Builder communicates with the servers to install the correct configuration. It will also use the Certification Wizard to ensure that all certificates on the network are valid.

With Lync Server, the ability for us to provide high availability with SBAs or a disaster recovery pool means that our employees can keep working without interruption while we work to solve problems. Hakkı Erdoğan Infrastructure Development Director, Yapi Kredi

To extend enterprise voice to its branch and subsidiary offices, Yapi Kredi is evaluating an AudioCodes survivable branch appliance (SBA). These appliances are based on cost-effective media gateways hosting the Microsoft Survivable Branch Appliance software package. The SBA provides a public switched telephone network (PSTN) connection that continues to provide communications capabilities in the event of wide-area network failure. “Right now, at our subsidiaries especially, if they lose their network connection, they lose everything,” explains Ali Serhan Çetin, Senior Systems Administrator at Yapi Kredi. “With the SBA in place they will not lose functionality and will still have access to a phone.”

Although employees who currently use enterprise voice already have headsets, Yapi Kredi is evaluating Jabra GN2000 USB headsets, which are optimized to work with Microsoft Lync communications software so that employees can place and manage calls and conferences through the Microsoft Lync 2010 client on the desktop. Additionally, the bank is evaluating the Microsoft LifeCam High Definition (HD) video cameras to use with Lync for video conferencing.

With the Lync 2010 client, Yapi Kredi employees will have a single, unified client to access the same capabilities they now use every day, such as audio conferencing, video conferencing, and desktop sharing. Several enhancements to the Lync client offer social networking experiences for employees. With the activity feed, they can provide additional presence information to their coworkers and federated colleagues. Through the Rich Contact Card, they can see organizational information such as people’s managers and direct reports—and they can also see people’s pictures. “We are working now to get pictures for all 15,500 employees loaded into Active Directory,” says Çetin. “People like being able to see who they are talking to.”

The IT department at Yapi Kredi will take advantage of the web-based management console, which they can use to manage Lync Server from any computer with a browser and a broadband connection. The system security team will also use role-based access control (RBAC) to define help desk roles more clearly and have more detailed management of permissions for administrators and help desk operators. The IT department will also migrate the Interactive Bot to Lync Server, so employees will continue to receive important technical notices through the Lync client.

After it deploys Lync Server 2010, Yapi Kredi plans to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for improved collaboration and information sharing. With the interoperation between Lync Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, the bank will be able to take advantage of additional capabilities like the Skill Search feature. With Skill Search, employees can look for subject matter experts at other bank branches or subsidiaries through either SharePoint Server or Lync Server.

Benefits
Yapi Kredi expects to continue to experience many of the same benefits with Lync Server 2010 that it experienced with Office Communications Server 2007 R2, particularly better communication and employee collaboration. It expects to see some additional benefits as well. “Lync Server was easy for us to deploy, and with all the capabilities available through one client, our employees have a better user experience. We also expect it will help us reduce costs,” says Çetin.

Increased Efficiency
With the Lync 2010 client, employees can more easily set up and join web conferences without having to switch applications. The unified client also makes it easier to escalate a phone call to a video conference. The availability of headsets and personal HD cameras also means that employees can use video conferencing more frequently from any location with a broadband connection.

People love the Activity Feed because they can more easily see if someone is out of the office or busy working on another project. That way, they do not waste time trying to contact someone who is unavailable. Ali Serhan Çetin Senior Systems Administrator, Yapi Kredi

“Our managers and directors are using the Microsoft HD cameras, and they love the HD video. We expect this to increase the use of video conferencing across the company,” says Çetin. The ability to rely on video and web conferencing helps employees at Yapi Kredi save time, because they can more easily join meetings from remote locations instead of having to travel.

Another feature of Lync Server 2010 that will help save time is the Activity Feed. “People love the Activity Feed because they can more easily see if someone is out of the office or busy working on another project,” explains Çetin. “That way, they do not waste time trying to contact someone who is unavailable.”

When Yapi Kredi deploys SharePoint Server 2010, employees will be able to easily perform a skill search to find a subject matter expert if the first person they want to contact is unavailable.

Eased Deployment and Management
The flexible architecture of Lync Server makes it easier for Yapi Kredi to deploy enterprise voice across all its locations. By deploying the SBAs at branch offices and subsidiaries, it can offer redundant functionality and voice connections to help keep employees productive. At its headquarters, Yapi Kredi can deploy a high-availability configuration for Lync Server in a virtual environment, to provide low-cost redundancy for one of its most business-critical solutions. “With Lync Server, the ability for us to provide high availability with SBAs or a disaster recovery pool means that our employees can keep working without interruption while we work to solve problems,” says Hakkı Erdoğan, Infrastructure Development Director at Yapi Kredi.

In addition, the security services team will be better able to manage resources through RBAC. For the IT team, the ability to manage Lync Server from anywhere through the web-based management console also makes it easier to be more productive at their jobs.

Reduced Costs
With Lync Server 2010 and new features such as HD video and a centralized user interface for audio, video, and web meetings, Yapi Kredi believes that employees will use online meetings more frequently, which will help reduce travel costs. The bank also expects to reduce costs by deploying Lync Server 2010 in a virtual environment, which will enable it to reduce the amount of required hardware for the solution. Finally, as more employees use enterprise voice through Lync Server, Yapi Kredi expects to reduce international toll charges for long-distance calls and mobile phone charges.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative and engaging and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.

For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/lync

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 in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. 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 Yapi Kredi products and services, call (90) 444-0-444 or visit the website at:
www.yapikredi.com.tr

For more information about AudioCodes products and services, call (972) 3-976-4000 or visit the website at:
www.audiocodes.com

For more information about Jabra products and services, call (800) 826-4656 or visit the website at:
www.jabra.com