The Seamless Enterprise

Previously, we talked about why Sprint chose three years ago to make the move to Unified Communications, something that this company has fully embraced, and continues to aggressively roll out across the enterprise. This time, we want to talk about the planning involved in moving UC from a concept to a reality.

As we mentioned, the key issues for Sprint at that point were getting out of the business of PBX management – leaving our network of nearly 500 PBXs behind – as well as reducing our global number of operating circuits, moving to a centralized SIP trunk solution, and leveraging mobility.

From a cost standpoint, we felt we had a good handle on what would be involved in moving from a decentralized network model back to a centralized one. In most cases, of course, centralization is usually less expensive, but also less flexible. Our planning called for an approach that increased flexibility even as it decreased costs.

When you look at the original business case, it actually proves out simply by eliminating all the thousands of LEC circuits we had in place, in favor of SIP trunking. We recognized that costs would go down in other areas as well. We knew that taking all our PBXs out of the picture would result in a significant savings in power usage, and we knew the costs of maintaining that extensive network, with all its moves, adds, changes, upgrades and other issues, would be eliminated. We also suspected that there would be office space savings as well, but we didn’t assume that for the purposes of our business case.

In preparing for the initial toe-in-the-water deployments of UC, we separated the technology considerations from the cultural questions. We blended our technical teams, which had previously been separately focused on voice and data, and then we evaluated which groups of users would be the most “friendly” regarding this change. We wanted to get them into the environment first, so they would not only prove the value of this migration but become champions for it. In our case, these early adopters were the IT personnel and many of our product people.

We also recognized that different tools would be important to different groups of employees. The marketing department had far different needs from our retail stores, for example. But our core group of tools were email, IM, VoIP, document sharing, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, and voice mail, with a single mailbox for all voice and email messages. There has been some modification since the initial rollout, but we’ll talk about that later.

As part of our efforts to inform and persuade employees, we set up an internal web page and began planning for the hands-on types of training that we knew it would take to make everyone comfortable with the changes in the way they communicate. In my next post, we’ll walk you through the first phase and tell you what we learned along the way.

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Tags: LEC, SIP trunking, Sprint, Unified communications, VoIP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Unified communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.