Success Stories

Due to the amount of growth and acquisitions the customer experienced over the last 5 years, their network environment became exceedingly diverse, which led to the inability to efficiently manage their vendor relationships, bills and agreements. This resulted in payment of services that were not in service, or no longer needed. Contracts were expiring and auto-renewing under the original non-competitive rates, which made it very difficult for the customer to move into modern products without having to pay large penalties. There were multiple points of contacts within the company and with the carriers, which made it difficult to trouble-shoot service impacting issues and outages.

We needed to perform an audit of all network related services including wireline and wireless services. The audit would provide a baseline for current telecom spend, contract expiration, types of products, and current carrier for each location. After the audit was performed, we were able to strategize our next steps. These steps included consolidating the voice (wireline and wireless) with one carrier and the WAN with another while reducing cost. This would eliminate multiple vendors and increase the ability for the IT staff to diagnose issues efficiently. While moving services to the new vendors, we wanted to move their WAN away from public VPN over data T1s into an MPLS environment utilizing a combination of optical and EoC services.

The wireline voice services were moved to a single provider. This eliminated 4 vendors. We were able to consolidate all services at all locations to one carrier that was able to provide PRI, SIP and hosted PBX. The future goal with the company was to phase out their premise-based PBX’s and implement a company-wide IP-based platform. By moving all services to one carrier, we were able to reduce their wireline telecom spend by 29%. After 19 months of savings, they will be able to pay for the entire cost to purchase IP phones for all their employees.

As for the wireless services, many employees were on their own plans and the company was reimbursing them for their usage. This created a lot of inefficiencies and overpayment. The customer was able to move all their wireless services to a single provider, which allowed us to renegotiate the existing contract with the primary provider and optimize existing plans to save them 22% off their past spend.

Their WAN moved from public-based VPN using T1s and cable to private VPN using T1s, fiber and EoC. We were able to find a single carrier to provide MPLS for all locations. We had 4 locations requiring high-capacity bandwidth, and we were able to install Ethernet over fiber at 3 locations and Ethernet over copper at the other. This increased their bandwidth over 10-fold and provided them with their own private data network fully managed by the carrier. We were able to do this while decreasing their WAN spend by 9%.

This restaurant chain was going through a serious growth mode for about five years. They went from adding one location each of their first three years in business to adding over twenty restaurants in four years. They did not have an on-site IT staff or a telecom manager to handle all of the installations and management of the telecom services. The ordering and project management of services fell on the controller and the CFO. This quickly became an overwhelming task to add to their daily responsibilities and costs were getting out of control. There was no plan in place to order new services for the new restaurants, which led to delayed openings, over-payment of network services, incorrect order delivery, extended hours to their contractors and installing multiple telecom vendors.

Our first job was to perform an audit. We needed to identify all services at all locations and figure out if any of the services were under contract. The next step was to find a carrier that could provide them with voice at all their locations. Another component was the cable provider. They needed to have cable TV at each location. We had to determine the best cable operator at each specific location to provide TV and internet. We knew we had to eliminate as much work as we could for the controller and CFO and steadily remove them from the ordering process.

After spending some time with the controller, we were able to gather all the bills sent to the corporate office and the individual restaurants. All of that information was entered into a spreadsheet, which allowed us to analyze their current telecom environment. We quickly realized some billing errors and helped the customer clean them up and go back to the carriers for credits. The next objective was to make the process as easy as possible for future openings. Working with the customer and their data and PBX vendors, we were able to create a pre and post opening checklist. Each individual and company would be able to follow the checklist and know their responsibilities. Eliminating multiple vendors was another goal. We found a carrier that was able to provide voice and back-up data at each of the locations and consolidated the cable TV and internet with three different providers. By cleaning up the bills, improving the ordering process and consolidating the voice and data services, we were able to reduce the monthly spend by 19% and save a lot of time and frustration.

This manufacturing company was experiencing a lot of growth, which put a major amount of stress on their network. The carrier they were using for all three plants was delivering service over T1s, and each plant had a local cable provider for their internet. They were using T1s for their voice and the cable was providing VPN over public internet. Because of the growth and their desire to start moving some of their servers off-site, the customer needed a solution that would provide them with a dedicated and private VPN between their locations and to a colocation. The corporate office was located in an area where a small ILEC was the local provider. The amount of options for voice and data carriers was very limited, and their current carriers could not offer a competitively priced solution. Adding to the problem was the fact the customer was still under contract with the voice provider.

Our first objective was to sit down with the customer and their IT vendor to map out an ideal WAN environment. Initially, we did not know how much bandwidth the customer was going to need at each location, so we had to find a solution that was scalable and cost effective. The bandwidth requirements would more than likely increase within the first year. The other issue was the voice contract and the penalty associated with it. Our goal was to minimize as much as possible the impact of the penalty.

After doing some research on the available options at the corporate site, we were able to find two carriers that could meet the customer’s requirements. Each carrier could build fiber into each of the plants and offer colocation in a data center located near the corporate site. The difference and deciding factor was the fact that one carrier could offer some contract assistance to help offset the penalty with the voice provider and not charge for installation or construction. By moving to an Ethernet over fiber environment, the customer increased their monthly spend by 30%, however, the option to bond T1s together to get the same bandwidth would have increased it by over 400%. The customer now enjoys a highly scalable, cost-efficient and private data network.