Service Investment House
Leading financial institution kills two birds with one stone with the adoption of an advanced IP Telephony solution
The Client
The client, a leading UK-based full service investment house, manages more than £43 billion of assets for a wide range of clients including pension schemes, insurance companies, private investors, corporations, mutual funds and affiliated group companies.
Recognising that the investment business remains highly competitive, with constant pressure on margins, it makes it a business imperative to deploy resources carefully, use economies of scale wherever possible and to invest in systems to maximise efficiency. This includes making innovative use of new technology and becoming an "early adopter" in order to achieve competitive advantage.
The Challenge
One of the immediate issues from a technology point of view was to review the company's voice and data networks. The LAN was beginning to show its age and was creaking at the seams. Replacement would be necessary by 2004. Even more pressing was the existing telephone network, originally installed in 1988, which was being delivered over a platform that would become end-of-life by June 2002. Longer-term management and support of both networks was becoming a major concern and urgent action was required.
The separation of the business from its parent company provided an opportunity to review an existing decision to replace the current telephony system with a PBX solution. This afforded the client the opportunity to start afresh, assess where the market was going and to consider the alternatives.
There were two main options. The first was the more traditional approach of replacing the PBX thereby retaining a conventional telephony solution, and replacing the LAN separately later. The second was to replace both voice and data systems with a converged network infrastructure carrying both voice and data.
Whilst there was a clear imperative to fulfil immediate business requirements, the client was determined to implement a solution that would allow it to gain a competitive advantage. A review of the market showed growing acceptance of IP Telephony and confirmed the belief that convergence of voice and data onto a common IP infrastructure was inevitable.
A traditional PBX solution was a safe solution, but it had limited ROI and locked the client into a proprietary solution. The alternative of adopting VoIP running over an upgraded LAN was more flexible; a better fit for their long-term strategy and would allow their business to grow without technoLogicalis constraints. Analysis also forecast that the client would achieve savings of more than £1M over a five-year period compared to a traditional PBX solution.
Significantly, by implementing an IP Telephony solution, applications such as CTI integration, voice recording and integrated messaging could be implemented, as well as simplifying support and maintenance requirements.
Following an in-depth technology review, with a full internal proof-of-concept exercise a recommendation was made to change the previous strategy in favour of creating one highly resilient infrastructure supporting both voice and data.
The Solution
Logicalis' first challenge was to successfully implement a proof-of-concept project to prove the technology and the integrator's understanding of the client's business and technology drivers. The pilot was a complete success; Logicalis was able to demonstrate the suitability of the technology and to help to justify the project from a business perspective.
The successful completion of this pilot led to the full project implementation of a Cisco based converged network solution, encompassing a LAN upgrade (based on Cisco Catalyst 6500 including 3000 ports across four sites) and a Cisco AVVID IP Telephony Voice Solution supporting 1,300 IP Telephone handsets. The system also includes Cisco's Unity and Call Manager products integrated with Voice Recording products from Eyretel and IP help desk/operator consoles from Arc. The entire solution was implemented by the end of July, more than two months ahead of schedule!
The Bottom Line
The result of the implementation is a flexible, future-proof, standards-based architecture that combines voice and data onto a single highly resilient IP infrastructure.
The use of a common network platform for both voice and data has significantly reduced overall infrastructure costs and greatly simplified overall management of the system. A single support contract has now replaced two previously separate agreements, and the burden of maintenance and spares-holding is also reduced. Furthermore, because IP Telephony handsets enable dynamic relocation, it also make user adds, moves and changes a far easier proposition. People can move desks as and when required and be productive far more quickly. Not only does this afford the business greater flexibility, but it also represents a significant cost saving over the traditional telephony solution, which required the support of telephone engineers every time a user moved.
Over and above the infrastructure savings there are additional productivity benefits derived from the use of IP Telephony handsets. Users benefit from features such as unified messaging. With the Cisco Unity application users can listen to their e-mail over the telephone, check voice messages from the Internet, and forward faxes to any local fax machine thereby increasing productivity while improving customer service and responsiveness.