Going VoIP... with little Cisco gear

Former Cisco engineer is building a global VoIP network with Interactive Intelligence, Polycom gear

Ex-Cisco engineer Dave Cote has ambitious plans for Stanley Works' global VoIP network: hundreds of sites and potentially tens of thousands of Session Initiation Protocol phones. But the project will involve little gear sporting his old employer's logo.

Slideshow: take a closer look at Stanley Works' global VoIP rollout

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Ex-Cisco engineer Dave Cote has ambitious plans for Stanley Works' global VoIP network: hundreds of sites and potentially tens of thousands of Session Initiation Protocol phones. But the project will involve little gear sporting his old employer's logo.

Slideshow: take a closer look at Stanley Works' global VoIP rollout

The tool maker in January began a companywide rollout of VoIP servers from Interactive Intelligence. The plan is to use a centrally hosted VoIP model to consolidate a network built on hundreds of disparate PBX and key telephone systems, acquired over 20-plus years as Stanley bought almost a dozen other companies.

"Stanley Works hired me to come in and upgrade all of that, and I think, to put in all Cisco VoIP gear," says Cote, who ran Cisco's Voice Technology Group test lab in Boxboro, Mass., for six years prior to heading the global telecommunications group at Stanley last year. "I'm sure Cisco [expected that] too, but that just didn't make sense to me with this business and how it operates." The approach he's chosen could save the company up to $4 million (or $400 per user) over a single-vendor network.

Stanley's VoIP toolbox

Before Cote came to Stanley, the company already started down the VoIP path with a Cisco CallManager-based VoIP system for a large Midwest call center. Instead of building out this network to the rest of the company, Cote plans to deploy Interactive Intelligence call center and IP PBX servers at three central data centers in Connecticut, Indiana and Texas. From these spots, VoIP services will extend worldwide over an MPLS-based IP VPN service the company is turning on with carrier Level 3.

From his vendor days at Cisco, Cote's under-the-hood knowledge of VoIP products and technology is reflected in some of the tools he is using in the project at Stanley. Cote is building the Stanley VoIP network with call processing, gateway and handset technologies from a variety of sources — some well-known, others not.

"There are so many systems out there, it's kind of overwhelming," Cote says. "The reason I picked [Interactive Intelligence] was not for the fact that we needed to get something out there right away. They'd done a lot of [product development for large-scale VoIP], and they've been in the game for a long time."

The core of the project starts with Interactive Intelligence's Customer Interaction Center (CIC), a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based automated call distributor platform with call center features. Stanley is also using Interactive Intelligence's SIP Interaction Media Server, a SIP-based IP PBX for office users. Stanley has already started deploying to some of its call center agents on the Interactive Intelligence suite, while connecting small sales offices (around 50 workers per site) to the system for regular business telephony services.

Since the corporatewide MPLS network isn't fully in place yet, Cote says, some sites are linking to the Interactive Intelligence servers through the company's existing WAN. Very small offices without T-1 connections use SSL VPN. (The company's SSL gear, as well as LAN and WAN equipment, is mostly Cisco-based). These workers appear and work as if part of a larger corporate dial plan, as calls are set up and managed via the IP network, but voice traffic is routed over the public switched telephone network (PSTN).