As a buyer, retailer goes leading edge

By Phil Hochmuth, Network World
November 24, 2003 12:11 AM ET

Electronics retailer CompUSA is popular among seekers of high-tech upgrades, whether for superfast PCs, photo-quality printers or the latest games.

When it came time for CompUSA to upgrade the network supporting its 230 U.S. stores, the No. 2 consumer electronics retailer reached for some leading-edge technologies for its own use: voice over IP (VoIP), Wi-Fi and a converged IP VPN/frame relay WAN.

"We tell our customers we've got the leading technology, and now we're starting to use some of that ourselves," says Ken Monroe, director of IT communications and support services. "There are a lot of savings out there with [VoIP] and wireless."

One problem CompUSA wants to address is its expensive telecom infrastructure. The company has Nortel Meridian PBXs in each store, but these systems are basically islands - there is no unified management, and long-distance calls result in big monthly bills.

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"Stores are always calling each other for inventory checks, or for personnel transfers," Monroe says.

He estimates the company can save about $2.7 million over five years by moving inter-store calls off of the public switched telephone network and onto CompUSA's data network. With IP PBXs on CompUSA's backbone, software updates and maintenance to the systems also could be done centrally.

Monroe and his staff evaluated Alcatel, Cisco and Mitel IP PBX offerings. But the Alcatel product proved too costly so it came down to Cisco's CallManager IP PBX and Mitel's ICP 3300.

"The problem with Cisco was it didn't have a PBX feature we use extensively - multiple call ringing," he says. Having the ability of an incoming call to ring multiple phones is useful in retail, Monroe says. That left the Mitel box as the primary choice.

The next step was to bring the Mitel ICP 3300 into the lab. "The first thing we did was sic our security people on the product," Monroe says. "They're basically a couple of hackers. We tell them go break things, so they went into the Mitel box and broke it. We test everything that way."

The ICP 3300 is a Linux-based appliance with an operating system modified to support only IP PBX functions. But Monroe's staff found some problems.

"The Mitel [IP PBX] just had a ton of ports open," says Rob Hilliard, WAN manager at CompUSA, who helped discover the vulnerabilities. The ports let Hilliard and Security Manager Pat Hykkonen reach the appliance's operating system and shut it down. "That was the configuration straight out of the box," Hilliard says. "The developers must not have thought about that. We told them, and they fixed it."

Now the IT group has more confidence in the product, he says.

Each CompUSA store will get an ICP 3300 and up to 50 IP telephones. CompUSA also is upgrading store LANs, installing Cisco Catalyst 2900 series switches that support 802.1p traffic prioritization. That will ensure voice packets are given top priority when switched over the LAN and WAN.

Most CompUSA stores have product support/repair departments and provide in-store training classes, and some stores provide small-business IT services.

These subgroups have unique call-feature requirements, such as voice mail for the service groups, hunt groups for support technicians, and multi-line calling and paging for sales. The Mitel box supports these functions. "We wanted the changeover to be as transparent as possible to our staff" in terms of features available, Monroe says.

Thirty of the Mitel boxes have been deployed and another 168 will be installed next year. The rest of the stores, and several new ones scheduled to be opened, will be upgraded in 2005. This schedule takes into account stores coming off Nortel leases. " We didn't want to buy a bunch of equipment and sit on it," Monroe says.