|
Polaris cuts collaboration costs with Avaya GlobalConnect
Avaya GlobalConnect helped Polaris cut collaboration costs
while enhancing profitability in less than six months. By Manjari Juneja
 Polaris
Software required a successful mechanism for global collaboration among its
distributed offices and expert teams. It started using external services about
three years back with dramatic effectiveness; however, it soon realized that
it was spending significantly on such collaboration.
The usage of third-party conference bridges exceeded 20,000 minutes costing
up to Rs. 20 lakhs per month besides heavy spending on interoffice national
and international calls. This load was steadily growing as the company became
more IP and collaboration centric and Polaris felt an urgent need to create
a internal cost-effective and scalable collaboration infrastructure.
V. Balakrishnan, Partner & CIO, Polaris Software Lab Ltd., said, “Polaris
adopted the conferencing habit for collaboration among the geographically dispersed
expertise and project delivery teams about two years back and a very effective
'service' implementation using an outsourced agency took the usage to exceeding
5 lakh minutes of global interoffice conferencing per month, and this came at
a significant cost. At this volume, we felt that the time was ripe to invest
in an internal audio conferencing solution interconnecting global Polaris offices,
and riding on top of the data networks that were already in place.”
Since the employees at Polaris had been using a third-party conferencing bridge
for a significant period of time, the new in-house bridge would see adoption
and higher usage only if it offered improved quality of experience at a good
ROI.
Polaris engaged with Avaya GlobalConnect (AGC) for the same and selected the
latter’s Meeting Exchange solution. AGC recommended that Polaris implement
a scalable, in-house conference bridge. The solution would exploit the company’s
recently implemented MPLS-based global data network for all interoffice calls
and conferences using VOIP and reduce the usage of the third-party bridges while
offering a consistent collaboration experience to users across the organization.
The Solution
Avaya GlobalConnect provided Polaris with a robust optimal design for reducing
the conferencing expenditure of Polaris. The solution gave Polaris an Avaya
PBX connecting to the existing infrastructure at the company via PRI trunks
from the existing router that, in turn, connected to the conferencing server
via SIP trunks. The number of ports was right sized to the need of Polaris.
Avaya Bridgetalk, a bridge management console provides Polaris with a variety
of monitoring and analytical reports on conferencing bridge use.
Apart from the bridge, AGC also provided IP Softphones for Polaris employees
to connect to conferences from their roaming notebooks in remote locations over
an Internet connection.
Added Balakrishnan, “We have taken a 120 channel audio conference bridge
from AGC. This accepts calls from existing PBX systems through IP and TDM connects.
We have also taken an IP calls exchange for softphone and IP phone connects
to conferences. There has been a direct cost benefit, in terms of monthly savings
in outsourcing costs, creating an ROI of less than six months.”
The Avaya Meeting Exchange solution works over Polaris’ IP network and
it allows users to dial in from across the globe over IP, reducing the conferencing
charges as well as international calling expenses. AGC assisted Polaris in successfully
shifting users to the in-house bridge.
- Reduced expenditure on communication,
saving Rs. 20 lakh per month, by shifting all internal conferences (70%
of total third-party conference bridge use) to Avaya Meeting Exchange
- Enhanced the collaboration experience
of its employees and made it homogeneous across the organization
- Implemented a solution that is easily
scalable at very low incremental cost thus ensuring a longer useful
life for the investment
- Through communication expense reduction,
provided payback on investment in less than six months
- Achieved better monitoring of collaboration
platform usage and effectiveness
- Conference scheduling and management
- Additional privileges to a conference
moderator like dial-out, participant hang-up, adjusting volume of conference,
roll calls, lecture mode, etc.
- Participants or administrators can now
schedule individual conferences through a Web-based console
- Internal recording facility for playing
back conferences at a later point of time
- Better managed participant and moderator
codes for security purposes
|
Challenges in adoption
The biggest challenge was to ensure successful implementation of the collaboration
platform at Polaris and to shift the users from expensive third-party bridge
to the cost-effective and better quality in-house bridge.
“The building up of a robust data network with QOS assured for voice traffic
was the main challenge as conference connect locations were unpredictable and
there had to be significant over provisioning of quality bandwidth to ensure
that there were no drops in audio conferences,” informed Balakrishnan.
Other challenges were Topology improvement; TDM – IP conversion, compression
issues management; Bandwidth requirements and allocation; Codec compatibility
issues resolution; Legal compliance issues management and enhancing organizational
coverage of the solution.
Sharing the company’s plans, Balakrishnan said, “We plan to integrate
the AGC equipment with our internal mail directories, further to achieve ‘click
to call’ and ‘click to conference’ facilities as well as parallel
ringing between desk and hand phones. We are also working on solutions to convert
roaming calls of managers travelling on business to outgoing calls to specific
destinations to save on the costs of roaming telephones.”
manjari.juneja@expressindia.com
|
