Brown Brothers succeeds with VoIP

The town of Milawa was once a stopover for goldminers on their way from Melbourne to Victoria’s north-east gold fields. Now it is home to the headquarters of one of the region’s principal wineries, Brown Brothers.

A communication crunch came for the company when some of their telecommunications systems needed attention at the same time, prompting the company’s CIO to consider VoIP.

A couple of problems arose with Brown Brothers’ existing PABX, says the company’s CIO John A Brown. It was not compatible with Telstra’s new standard and the manufacturer had just announced the PABX’s “end-of-life”.

“It would have meant making a substantial investment in an old PABX technology which would have been throwing good money after bad,” says Sean Dolkens from Logicalis and IBM’s network integration services.

Also the company was growing, bringing on some remote sites, and it wanted new features and functions that the old PABX could not support. Where should they go now?


The pitch

No matter how good the technology is, it will not get the deal over the line on its own merits, Dolkens says. “You have to show you understand the customer’s needs, outline exactly how the new technology can meet those needs, and be forthright about potential limitations. The most crucial aspect of the pitch is to gain the customer’s trust,” he says.

Brown Brother's Brown: Network took about six months

“We did our first IP telephony project in 1999," says IBM’s IP communications practice manager, Craig Campbell. "We’ve done upwards of 110 IP telephony implementations across Australia and New Zealand. The customer’s biggest concern is mitigation of risk, and you can only ease those [concerns] if you’ve got a proven track record of deploying IP telephony.”

Brown says IBM gave him a list of reference customers -- previous IP telephony customers -- whom he was able to quiz about the process and outcomes.

“At that stage for me as CIO, VoIP was a little closer to the technology curve than I’d usually like to be, particularly for a project so sensitive as phones. If phones stop, people get grumpy fairly quickly,” Brown says.

“I’d worked with IBM for some time. I had a relationship with them and knew they had the skills and the resolve to pull this thing off. I knew there’d be issues along the way but I knew that IBM wouldn’t just leave me with the ugly duckling -- they’d make damn sure the thing worked for me.”

Dolkens says Brown chose IBM because he also knew the organisation had skilled people available to support them in all of their wineries’ locations, the remote regional ones, not just in capital cities.



The groundwork
 
The pre-installation preparation has to be meticulous. There is a lot of information gathering, scoping, making sure you have included all the features the company wants, as well as the new functions.

It is as important to clearly outline what the new technology will not deliver, as it is to outline what it can deliver, so expectations are crystal clear from the outset.

Dolkens says good groundwork includes sizing, scaling, security protocols and bandwidth requirements.

“Also when deploying these kinds of systems, understand that they’re not used by IT people but by users who are non- IT professionals,” he says.

“Always keep in mind the end users. Provide features that are of benefit to them and the training and education so they can use these systems once implemented. That way the company gets the real benefit out of deploying the solution,” Dolkens says.

IBM installed core Cisco routing and switching equipment and implemented a Cisco IP telephony solution. It was based on an IBM xSeries server. They used Unified Messaging Software by Performance Solutions Australia. At the same time they deployed a new WAN (wide area network) to each of the company’s four sales offices.

It took about six months all up, from putting out the tender to actually being live, stable and happy with it, says Brown. 

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