Switching to VoIP means less expensive management and maintenance for ThyssenKrupp Elevator - Americas’s telecom group, and it promises even more cost savings in the future for the elevator manufacturer.

As its PBXs aged, replacing them with VoIP made sense on many levels, says Adam Kimball, the director of IT services for the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company.

So far adopting VoIP has resulted in a more flexible and fully-featured call-center infrastructure that supports sales, service, parts distribution and help-desk groups, he says. Over time, the VoIP network also will save on long-distance costs among the company’s 160 offices.

The technology has enabled the distributed company to slowly migrate from traditional PBXs as each of its regions decides it is time to retire the old gear, Kimball says. In this way it avoided a massive project to change over the entire phone system at one time.

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The company has been eyeing VoIP products for more than two years, and three years ago switched to an MPLS fully meshed network service from Verizon. The idea was that MPLS could accommodate VoIP by having Verizon turn on quality-of-service and perhaps upgrade some network access lines, Kimball says.

ThyssenKrupp’s old telecom infrastructure consisted of 60% to 70% Avaya PBXs, with most of the remaining gear made by Intertel along with keysets made by a smattering of other vendors. As each one reaches end of life, regional company executives decide what to do about replacing them, and so far all have bought into VoIP.

“We needed a system that would work at a single office, and if we never installed another system it would still work at that office as a stand-alone phone system,” Kimball says. “We also needed that single office to provide some of the wow features -- voicemail in your [e-mail] inbox, softphone capability, the call management platform, unified messaging.”

On the administrative front, the major driver for VoIP was the ability to centralize telecom support and reduce the number of trips telecom staff had to make to branch offices, Kimball says. “That’s difficult to do with a legacy PBX system,” he says. “We had disparate systems and the support costs that went along with it.”

Moving a phone could involve flying a telecom tech to a regional office, which is much more costly than having the phone moved and registering itself with the network as is the case with VoIP.