April 28, 2006

How An SMB Decides On VoIP

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

A family owned business launched in 1938, Pacific Lumber is one of the four companies owned by the Morse family. The family has eight locations including lumber yards, truss plants, door and mill work manufacturing and sales offices. Their 300 employees cater to large and small home builders in Oregon and Washington.

About three years ago, after opening a new lumber yard in Bend, Oregon, the costs to operate and maintain their legacy phone system soon escalated beyond what they could tolerate. Though the telephone equipment was all paid for and worked as advertised, even small changes were complex, expensive and time-consuming.

Lesson: Without an extensive in-house IT department, SMBs love products that are anything but complex, expensive or time-consuming. And yes, they're out there.

Alan Churchill, Director of MIS at Pacific Lumber, began looking at possible system replacements. He hoped that moving to an IP (Internet Protocol) telephony product could save money. Key to the project was the need to connect all locations on a single IP network. “We wanted one person answering the phone for all yards at Pacific,” said Churchill. “Plus we needed a system that was cost-effective and easy to manage. We were looking for a phone system that we could simply plug into our existing WAN.”

Lesson: SMBs don’t like having to invest in things like new WANs if they don’t have to, they don’t believe in upgrading just to have the newest, fastest or whateverest.

Churchill contacted several major VoIP product vendors, as well as Zultys Technologies, in search of a system that was low cost, simple to administer and easy to use. “We almost didn’t pursue Zultys, mainly because it was half the cost of the others. It just seemed to good to be true,” he said. “But when we contacted other users and tested it in our own lab, we discovered that it really did outshine the others.”

Lesson: Watch your price point. This reporter needed his house painted a few years ago, and got quotes of $7,500, $6,000, $10,000 and $2,500. Honest. Guess which two guys didn’t get call backs.

Pacific Lumber installed an MX250 IP PBX system from Zultys and their ZIP 4x4 IP business phones. The implementation took a total of two days. “We especially liked the way we could administer the entire system remotely from a web site. Our old phone systems required a ‘truck roll’ for every single little issue,” Churchill said.

The Zultys end user client interface (MXIE) one button conferencing, a key consideration for Pacific Lumber. “MXIE ensures that our customers can reach us at all times, since calls can automatically be routed to our cell phones. Plus, any employee can reach another employee at any location simply by using their four-digit extension,” Churchill says.

One major consideration was that Zultys integrated into their existing IT infrastructure: “Every other vendor wanted us to change our switches and routers.”

Lesson: See Lesson Two above. Other companies looked at Pacific Lumber from their point of view. Zultys looked at Pacific Lumber from Pacific Lumber's point of view.

Overall, it’s “a system that was simple to implement, easy to use, worked with our existing switches and routers and cost less than we were paying.”

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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

(source: http://voipforsmb.tmcnet.com/news/articles/1060-how-an-smb-decides-voip.htm)