Converged net saves GMAC money while upping bandwidth

ORLANDO, Fla. - An MPLS WAN that carries voice, video and data is saving financial firm GMAC Commercial Mortgage more than $162,000 per year, boosting bandwidth and making it simpler for users to connect with each other.

The converged network supports eight times the traffic that the old WAN did and also holds reliability advantages, says Niraj Patel, the executive vice president and CIO of the firm, during his keynote address at VoiceCon 2004 here Tuesday.

For the first time the show featured an end user as a keynote speaker, perhaps indicating a new stage in VoIP's evolution - customers talking about their experiences rather than vendors promising performance. The show is packed with potential users, with most sessions so full people are sitting on the floor.

""This is not career-threatening," Patel says of implementing converged IP networks. "I've deployed and I'm still employed."

Patel says that VoIP over the GMAC WAN was intended to provide a more flexible and accessible network for its 3,600 employees that would boost productivity as the company grew from $2 billion 10 years ago to $270 billion today.

The MPLS network is fully meshed, supports four levels of quality of service, presents no single point of failure and offers alternative access to the Internet if a link should fail, Patel says.

In addition, with a voice-activated auto-attendant and control of video gear by end users, the converged network is making collaboration across the company easier, he says. Putting control in the hands of users also reduces administrative costs, freeing up time for other work by his 200-member IT staff, he says.

With the IP-based network, the company has dropped its long-distance trunks among sites, giving them flat pricing that is actually less expensive per call, according to Patel.

The use of video cuts travel costs while encouraging cooperative projects because the participants schedule and set up the conferences themselves, he says. Videoconferencing savings alone are $100,000 by using IP rather than ISDN, Patel says.

Because much of the company's business is done overseas, it incurred hefty international phone bills. With the MPLS network and IP calls, the company is spending $60,000 less on international calls, Patel says.

IP cards in the companies' Nortel PBXs connect them to the MPLS WAN and tie together the 109 GMAC offices around the world. Currently all international phone calls are IP, 20% of U.S. calls are and 99% of videoconferences are IP, he says.

Because the network is based on IP, GMAC workers with laptops can fire up softphone software on them and make the computer an extension on the company phone system, boosting workers' productivity and again cutting costs, says Patel.

The MPLS network supplied by Masergy supports four qualities of service - voice, video, priority data, and data - and QoS is essential for a project like GMAC's.

"Please do not try to do this with your older networks," Patel says. "You do want to have quality of service."

He says the company is considering adding a softswitch in the network so it can handle PBX functions via IP Centrex, enabling the company to pull its PBXs.