Software-based unified communications help flower wholesaler blossom

By Shamus McGillicuddy, News Editor 21 Aug 2008 | SearchUnifiedCommunications.com

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"They really started using presence as a piece of the business," said Dave Watson, a project manager with Advanced Call Processing (ACP), a value-added reseller that worked with FlorExpo. "They made it an employee requirement that if you left your desk, you updated your presence information. Many of the sales and production people would frequently leave their desks for extended periods of time. Having presence there, they quickly realized it would improve communication and efficiency."

Today, many companies are just beginning to test the unified communications waters, and software-based IP telephony is still a relatively immature market. For FlorExpo, however, these technologies are old hat.

The company deployed a software-based Sphericall IP PBX from Sphere Communications at its Carlsbad, Calif., headquarters in 2004. Just a year later, it extended Sphericall to its Portland, Ore., and Monterey Bay, Calif., locations. NEC bought Sphere last year, but it has maintained the brand.

"We had a really old TDM traditional phone system, an Inter-Tel hybrid PBX with key system features," said Piri McMullan, FlorExpo's director of IT. "It was old and problematic. The phones had almost weekly problems, and the phone system itself was taking up more and more space. We were coming out of contract with our provider at the time, and they wanted thousands of dollars just to put it back under contract. It felt like beating a dead horse there with the system."

FlorExpo's executives didn't plan on adopting an IP telephony system. They simply wanted to upgrade their phones. But early on in their search, they realized that emerging UC technology could help transform the business.

"We were struggling with administrative functions of the existing system," McMullan said. "That was what I was really focusing on – something that would be easy for us to administer and change. And being able to provide the user with front-end software that was going to be easy to use as well was very critical for us."

McMullan said the unified messaging and presence that Sphericall offered was "icing on the cake."

Working with ACP, McMullan looked at a number of possible replacement technologies, such as Cisco. But the graphical user interface (GUI) of Sphericall's endpoint, with its intuitive presence capability, really jumped out at him.

"The way you can basically see everyone in the company right there," he said. "They're online, they're on the phone. They're a click away from calling or [sending an instant message]. You don't have to search for them. Some other voice systems I've seen – you have to do a search or start typing to get the person in there. This GUI is just laid out with everything at your fingertips. It's kind of an easy dashboard to utilize."

The Sphericall IP PBX runs on industry-standard server technology. At FlorExpo, the software runs on HP DL360 servers. The Portland and Monterey facilities connect to the Sphericall server via a VPN network that connects all three sites. But each site also has its own Sphericall server in case of a WAN outage. The phones, mostly IP phones from Astra and Polycom, are powered and connected by standard HP ProCurve PoE switches that plug into the company's core Cisco switch. The ability to run a software-based solution rather than an appliance-based technology appealed to FlorExpo.

"Software-based solutions are generally cheaper," said Irwin Lazar, principal analyst and program director, collaboration and convergence, with Nemertes Research. "It runs on general-purpose hardware, so you don't need to buy a specific appliance. And most software-based solutions tend to be a little bit more extensible, so it provides a little more flexibility from the customer perspective and reseller perspective for creating custom-solutions."

In addition to the desk phones, McMullan has also distributed softphones to the PCs of the company's 150 employees.

Watson said he and McMullan once joined the company's accounting team on a trip from Carlsbad to the Monterey Bay office.

"The accounting team headed into a conference room there," Watson said. "They all fired up their laptops and plugged in USB headsets and started taking calls right there from the conference room. When you think of travel and remote employees, it isn't necessarily totally remote. They were just remote from their desks. Yet they were at another one of their business' sites, and they were able to take the Sphericall software that typically managed their IP phones and convert it into a softphone. Their phone is still with them on a different business property."

McMullan said the unified messaging technology in Sphericall has also been a "huge" value for the company. The company's automated call processing has been transformed. A lot of customers call into a voicemail system to place flower orders, he said. In the past, those voicemails were difficult to manage. With unified messaging, order processing has been streamlined.

"With Sphericall and ACP, we were able to create a lot of intuitive menus within the Sphere system that tied into unified messaging," McMullan said. "Before, a lot of people had to go in and chase the data, grab it, pull it out and work with it. Now all of a sudden it's sitting on this unified messaging system and the data is just being sent to us -- being sent to the right people, and being sent immediately."

McMullan said that, moving forward, he will be upgrading from Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

"Initially, when we deployed Sphere, it was MGCP only, and SIP was still very much a question mark as far as interoperability and reliability," he said. "As we move forward, our IP phones are moving to the SIP protocol, and with that we are moving to a more Web-based, XML-type of capability in the system. Things like SIP trunking and customized software as it relates to our phone system and unified communications are coming to light, and perhaps there are additional things we can do on that front."

Henry Dewing, principal analyst with Forrester Research, said the transition to SIP makes sense.

"MGCP is just a service-provider-oriented, telco-heritage protocol, as opposed to SIP, which is more of an IT-heritage protocol," Dewing said. "SIP gives you greater interoperability. SIP will allow you to interoperate outside of the firewall. You're less likely to have to buy a gateway to do the protocol conversion. Any time you do protocol conversion, you're introducing potential for latency and jitter onto the media stream. So the less computing you're putting on the wireline, the better off you are."

Let us know what you think about the story; email: Shamus McGillicuddy, News Editor

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