How’s This for a Unified Communications Success Story?
One of the things that Marketing loves is a good customer success story. Showing what one company is doing successfully with your product is a great way to get others interested.
Sprint Wireline Marketing didn’t have to look far for a success story in connection with our recent SIP Trunking announcement. As that announcement notes, we are our very own success story. Yes, we are seriously walking the walk when it comes to unified communications.
How seriously? Well, we are deploying SIP trunking in connection with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (OCS 2007 R2) to nearly 500 offices nationwide. We used to connect the typical office to headquarters via an ISDN PRI circuit, a voice VPN (virtual private network) circuit, and a voice mail circuit. Now, a single SIP trunk running over our MPLS network replaces all three of those.
This network streamlining is expected to save the company $6 million a year in local carrier charges, and about $1 million a year by eliminating the need for PBX upgrades and maintenance. Those are impressive savings anytime, but in a tough economy like this one, they mean even more.
In addition to cost savings, this brings the benefits of unified communications to users anywhere and everywhere in the company – and beyond. The capability of OCS 2007 to federate with others makes it easy to enjoy the benefits of connecting with partner companies in their own UC implementations. Adding contacts from outside your company is almost as easy as those from within – and you can control how much information about your status that you are willing to share with others.
It is surprisingly simple to know where people are and whether they’re available, and then connect with them in the most convenient and useful way, whether that’s via IM, a voice call, video connection, or a conference call. Mobile phones and mobile computing are also part of what this very easy to use unified communications infrastructure, thanks to the OCS 2007 R2 integration.
Sprint people are giving this two thumbs up, and not just because we sell it.
-Steve Coker
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SubscribeTags: Microsoft Open Communications Server, MPLS, MPLS network, OCS, OCS 2007 R2, SIP, SIP trunking
February 11th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
[...] where Sprint’s own success story – our use of UC that Steve Coker talked about in his recent posting – comes in handy. It tells the hard dollar story for the benefit of potential customers. But for [...]
March 20th, 2009 at 8:43 am
[...] Sprint itself. You can find more about our internal use of SIP trunking and its cost savings here, but the Tweeter-sized version of the story is that with a single SIP trunk running over our MPLS [...]
November 13th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
[...] blogged about Sprint’s experiences before, and it’s an interesting story. UC has put our company on track to $6 million in savings, [...]