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.
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“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. Brown says there were few hiccups during the VoIP project. He had planned to use some softphones, but “due to the discovery of a bug between the voicemail software and the softwarephones, we went with hard handsets, which were more expensive,” he says.
Brown says another potential challenge comes from when you have a number of different parties involved in the one project.
“The voicemail comes from one party, the handsets from another, and the servers from another. There needs to be some clarity and confidence that they’re all going to work together and that one person is going to take the responsibility for them all,” he says.
One of the traditional fears and realities of integration projects is that technology vendors can end up pointing fingers at each other if there is a stuff-up, and the buyer ends up being stuck in the middle. Brown says he was fortunate to deal with the one person throughout the implementation.
Benefits
Brown Brothers receives a lot of orders for its wine via its call centre, from all over Australia and internationally. One of the problems with the old PABX was the company had very limited capacity to measure and monitor call quality and handling of those calls.
“The call centre was such a critical part of their business. They wanted to be able to obtain metrics from the call centre to make sure they were meeting customers’ requirements, and if not, how to improve them. The new VoIP system enabled that function,” says Campbell.
Brown Brothers was able to put funds saved by deploying VoIP towards a WAN, which the winery did not have before.
"We put in a voicemail system for the first time in the company. Also because of the infrastructure we were running, it integrated fully with Microsoft Outlook.
We’ve been using Outlook very heavily throughout our business for email, publishing calendars, scheduling meetings and other workflow aspects,” says Brown. Not only does this improve productivity, it ultimately improves endcustomer satisfaction.
At the time of installation, one of the differences between the solutions Brown reviewed was the compression technology. “Although more expensive from a capital point of view, we got significant running cost advantages because it was superior compression technology,” he says.
On completion
The feedback from users of the new VoIP system was that it was easy to use. Brown says there was not much resistance in terms of adoption. IBM puts that down to good user training and the management of expectations.
Brown agrees. “When people get a new technology of any kind, they’ve got this funny habit of assuming that it’s going to fix all their problems -- whether technology-related or not.”
“Part of it is getting real about expectations upfront, because when people have surprises in a project, they get grumpy about it. Make it clear what this [new technology] can and can’t do, and what responsibilities actually lie with the end user to make it work for them,” he says.
Brown’s last word: “You never know what your business is going to do and you never know exactly which way you’re going forward, so you need to be building the base architecture of your IT systems so you’ve got options going forward.”
“A technology like VoIP gives you considerable options and that increases the agility of your business and the ability to respond to changing business needs down the track.”
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