Quilogy is a professional services company based in St. Charles, Missouri, and a Microsoft Gold partner. In addition to five buildings in St. Charles, its some 250 employees are scattered among 13 other cities across the Western half of the United States.
Growing Pains
(news - alert) As the company grew - it initially had just two buildings in St. Charles - it realized that its ancient traditional PBX system no longer was capable of the functionality or capacity that was required.
“I would say the system we were using was bought used before I got here, and it had probably been heavily used before we started using it,” said systems technologist Adam Swank. “I would say it was probably 20 years old.”
There were also technical and financial limitations. When the company acquired three additional buildings in a historical district of St. Charles, the traditional PBX was extended through just the two original buildings. Quilogy was then faced with a choice: purchase three new systems for the new buildings or find a way to extend the existing network to the new facilities.
According the Swank, the company felt there must be a better alternative, and when it fitted the new buildings for connectivity, it did so with the intent of installing some variety of network-based telephony system.
Quilogy finds itself on the leading edge of technology and, as such, is keenly aware of the benefits of SIP and was looking for a SIP-based platform that could communicate with its Windows environment and could also integrate into Microsoft's IM platform. The company looked at several companies, some large, some small, some hosted, some premises-based, but found nothing that met its requirements.
Hosted solutions, while popular, faced regulatory challenges in that, to have a phone system in each of its headquarters buildings, FCC regulations would have required running a T1 to each site. Hosted providers must assign each T1 identifier to an address, and they are not able to handle multiple addresses over one Internet connection. In order to comply with these 911 processing regulations, Quilogy would have been forced to radically alter its connectivity.
The Solution
So, after investigating several options, Quilogy finally found a premises-based, Windows-compliant system with the required features that also offered a trial period - and so the relationship with pbxnsip was born.
“There had been rumors about a Microsoft-based phone system that never really came to fruition,” Swank explained. “We wanted to use something that would be Microsoftcompliant in the future, but also something that we could use now. Pbxnsip definitely fit that bill.”
Because Quilogy had recently rehabbed several buildings and already made a number of network improvements - it already had the service capacity, the bandwidth, and the network - when it came down to pbxnsip, it was just a matter of the software and the phones. In fact, according to Swank, the deployment was so easy that they were able to place calls on the network the same day the server and software were installed.
Since the pbxnsip IP PBX is based on SIP, it easily integrates with a wide range of vendor hardware, which meant Quilogy was free to use additional hardware of its choice, like IP phones from Polycom and an IP gateway from AudioCodes. With pbxnsip, Quilogy has access to all the features of traditional IP PBXs, including end-to-end security, remote management, trunking support, call controls, conferencing, and much more. The latest release of pbxnsip, version 2.0 has added features like cell phone support, call recording, IM and presence capabilities, ENUM support, and more.
The Result
Since deploying pbxnsip in St. Charles more than a year ago, Swank says they are patently pleased with both the platform and the service from pbxnsip. There has been little need for support, but even when concerns arose around the phones or the gateway, pbxnsip provided internal contacts for Quilogy at the appropriate vendors, hastening the resolution process so that Eulogy's business would not be negatively impacted.
Quilogy has also deployed pbxnsip in its Seattle, Chicago, and Des Moines locations, and will add Nashville this spring. In Des Moines, in fact, Quilogy was able to save more than $1,000 per month on communications costs, but in addition to the communications capabilities cost savings, Swank notes that the relationship works because, “They are in line with what we are thinking as far as the future of SIP and Microsoft integration. They think the way we do and they're a very agile company like we are, so it was a good fit from that perspective.”
He added that, “In addition, it's an enterprise-level phone system at a non-enterprise price. They are definitely out there ahead of the curve.”
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