When you’re looking to solve an IT problem, how do you narrow down your choices and decide on the one? Maybe you’re looking for servers, more cloud storage, or a higher level of security. It’s easy to say look for the solution that does what you need – but these same tools can be sourced from multiple potential IT partners. What then?
Often, it pays to look beyond the technology and consider how you can put it to work and who can help you do it.
One of our customers, a longstanding commercial property insurance company in Canada, was looking to transform their telephony to what would be considered modern in 2022. Their legacy phone system was at its end of life, and they had a choice to Make: go with an updated system from the same vendor or create an opportunity out of this refresh cycle to enable their workforce to do more. With close to 2,500 staff across the country, any potential improvement in individual productivity and efficiency would definitely have a positive snowball effect on the company as a whole.
As it stood, the ageing equipment was costing the business over $700,000 a year to manage. It was a massive overhead cost, but the number didn’t add up to the system’s capability. It didn’t offer what a modern organization needed and what employees living in a world of remote and hybrid work expected. Companies today require a certain level of flexibility and confidence that they can have their staff work from anywhere with zero disruption.
Being a specialized legacy platform, it also required the customer to have an internal resource who knew how to maintain the system. Nobody is coming out of university and joining the IT space with any measurable training in this particular technology. Additionally, they needed to get in touch with a traditional carrier whenever they needed new lines as they expanded their workforce. That alone complicated managing the platform many times over.
With these business concerns, the customer came to us looking for a solution that would help them modernize their current system. Following discussions on the challenges they faced and what kind of outcomes they wanted to achieve, we set to work on migrating their legacy telephony to Teams Calling powered by Compugen Voice. We’d had great success with this solution and knew it was the right call to optimize their infrastructure.
More than just a cost consideration, a unified platform like Microsoft Teams elevates the overall work experience with a level of collaboration and communication that people call for today. In the end, the client slashed their telephony costs by 50%, which was what we expected in a business of this size. Some of our customers have realized even better cost reduction – the bigger the user base, the more they could potentially save.
You might think anyone could deploy the same solution and reap the same rewards, but this is where you look past the technology, which is only half of the equation. The other half has to do with figuring out if it even is the right one to begin with, based on your needs, and then having the skills required to design, implement, and manage the solution so that what used to be a problem is now a tool that enables you to do more.
Delivery is also a factor. When you have a tight timeframe, not everyone can work within your schedule. For this project, we had a two- to three-week lead time to equip 1,800 of their staff and two to three months to deploy to the rest of the organization. Reliable procurement is often overlooked when, in fact, it is one of the most significant considerations that will dictate whether you’re going to have a working solution when you need it – or not.Ultimately, you want a full-stack IT company with the breadth of skill and expertise as a partner who can look at your end goals as a business and put the individual pieces together to help you get there. At Compugen, we look at your environment and figure out ways to optimize your infrastructure to reduce cost, improve flexibility, and take the stress away. If you’d like to talk about how you can leverage Teams
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