Case Studies
True tales of customer success with Sentinel
Company Arrives Home Safely with New Voice & Collaboration Solution
Environment
The customer had an Avaya PBX phone system which had become unreliable and inadequate to service the company’s needs.
Challenge
The organization made a commitment to migrate from the old PBX technology and focused on voice solutions that could operate over their IP network. Due to the extra load that the IP voice system would create, additional preparatory work on their large Cisco network was needed before the installation of any new voice system.
The Customer’s requirements also included a need to communicate within the organization in a more efficient manner. They wanted to be able to see “presence” information so they would always know the availability of other employees. The ability to communicate via a company-wide standard instant messaging system, and in some cases, instant conferencing was also a requirement. In addition, the company’s multitude of employees would need training on the new phones and collaboration tools and their timeframe required Sentinel to do large site cut-overs every two weeks over several months.
Solution
Sentinel was chartered to implement a new Cisco Unified Communications environment using Call Manager for call processing and Unity voicemail. In addition, to meet customer’s needs for collaboration across their multiple locations, Cisco MeetingPlace (on-site solution) and Webex (cloud solution) were deployed.
Jabber was implemented to facilitate the instant messaging and “presence” needs. Selected users in areas such as the IT Department were provided with soft phones which enables phone functionality from the desktop PC or laptop.
Results
In addition to creating a voice platform with greatly improved reliability, the customer solution also included a fortified high availability network. End users were impressed with the durability and ease of use of the new Cisco phones. The company has experienced a large increase in cross-company collaboration due to the new MeetingPlace and Webex communication tools resulting in shortened product development life cycles while improving product designs.