UC Gets a Bug in its Ear with Terminix Deployment

 

Today, the company is happy to report that it has a new, IP-based unified communications system that offers desktop call management and that enables its IT staff of two to manage remotely the system. That includes the solution at the headquarters as well as related gear at eight of its 53 branch locations, which dot South Carolina, western North Carolina, and the Augusta, Ga., area.

 

"Instead of me having to get into a truck and drive three or four hours to the next branch office" to add a new phone to the system, for example, says Tommy Sellers, manager of corporate communications, he now can add or otherwise control phones remotely through an online portal.

 

Greg Braswell, area manager for the Mid-Atlantic at ShoreTel, says the management interface is called the ShoreWare Director and allows the distributed enterprise to be managed centrally.

 

Kevin Gavin, ShoreTel's vice president of marketing, adds that the ability to have a desktop client that auto starts at boot up is also a nice management feature of the ShoreTel system, for which customers pay a single license fee for the PBX, the administrative interface, the desktop devices and the UC backend.

 

Terminix Service acquired the solution through reseller Prime Line IPS, which was a new relationship for the customer. The simplicity of the system offered up by Prime Line IPS "knocked everything else out of the water," says Dorn.

 

That system includes a ShoreTel phone system at the Terminix Service headquarters office in Columbia, S.C., as well as at eight of its branch offices, as well as a Brocade/Foundry switch at the headquarters. ADTRAN power over Ethernet switches sit at the branches, Dorn adds.

 

The communications remodel, which Dorn estimates cost about $100,000 all told, also involved rewiring on the part of Terminix Service. The new IP telephone system couldn't run over its existing hodge-podge of wiring, which included CAT 3. Since it needed to get to at least CAT 5 to make things work, it went ahead and rewired the whole campus using CAT 6, which Dorn and Sellers say now makes the network easier to troubleshoot.

 

In the wide area, traffic runs over the WAN, as Terminix Service has an MPLS network running the equivalent of a T1 - about 1.5mbps synchronous. Smaller locations are brought into the network via DSL from their respective local providers. Dorn says each of branches also have POTS connections to support fax and ensure E911 access and other survivability in the event of a network outage.

 

Braswell of ShoreTel says the company was paying about $30 per trunk with the old system, but with the new setup was able to eliminate some of those lines in each of the offices with a unified dial plan that allows intra-company calls to go through an integrated network.

 

Beyond the centralized management, Terminix Service also got a wide variety of new calling features with the new system. That includes a call manager on the PC that displays visual voicemail on users' computers. This interface shows users who called, when they called and what's marked urgent. The solution also supports call routing, with an office anywhere feature that enables telecommuting from mobile devices or a home office, and a presence component for intelligent routing. A ShoreTel click-to-call feature, meanwhile, enables users to dial calls through a computer-based Outlook application. That's a big improvement to the former Terminix Service set up, in which the communications systems for each office were in separate silos, requiring 10-digit dialing between branch offices, says Braswell.

 

"It's the difference between a Volkwagen and a Ferrari," adds Gavin. UC