VoIP phone service reaps savings, features for staffing firm

Aquent's use of M5 VoIP service streamlines phone system and aids business processes

By Tim Greene, Network World
May 19, 2010 04:48 PM ET

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BOSTON -- When staffing firm Aquent scrapped its decentralized phone system for an outsourced VoIP service it saved $20,000 per month, expanded the features of its videoconferencing system and enhanced functionality of its ERP system in one fell swoop.

The service from hosted VoIP provider M5 also lets the company easily pass calls geographically, support disaster-recovery for the phone system and offer centralized voice mail that's integrated with e-mail, says Larry Bolick, Aquent's CIO.

What's next for MPLS?

The company had a mix of Nortel and Inter-Tel PBXs at its 40 North American sites serving 800 employees and 400 to 500 phones. The PBXs were nearing the end of their useful lives when, about 18 months ago, the company decided to change its business structure so that its different lines of business were handled by dispersed teams located in different offices.

That meant the teams needed better ways of communicating with each other. For example, if a member of the marketing team wasn't available, incoming calls had to be directed to another member of the team regardless of where that member was located. "We needed hunt groups for practices spanning multiple offices," Bolick says.

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Click to see: Diagram of Aquent's network

Similarly, the new system needed to be able to forward calls to other device such as handhelds, and to send voice mail as e-mail attachments so practice members could always be reachable.

Bolick wanted to move to a phone service with all the gear except handsets based in the provider's network to minimize capital outlay and maintenance costs. At the same time he wanted to move to VoIP to reap benefits of integrating communications with other business processes. Call-detail records gathered company-wide that can be tapped by the enterprise resource management system, for instance, will result in better tracking of workflows, he says.

Level 3 offered a service he wanted to test, but after several delays it couldn't deliver. He considered a Cisco infrastructure to support iPhones under a BlackBerry enterprise model, but the initial investment -- $300,000- plus, in addition to monthly fees of $50,000-plus -- was too high.

Fonality had no enterprise product, but he liked that it could back up configurations over the Internet. Aquent tried it in four sites, but full deployment would have meant a Fonality box at each site, and Bolick says he was pretty sure he could find a provider to host across all sites without local gear.

He looked at service providers Packet 8 and Press 8 but both were meant for smaller businesses.

He looked at outsourcing with DSCI, M5 Networks and Whaleback Systems. Whaleback was ruled out because it required purchasing hardware that would be arranged in regional hubs and spokes rather than a single, centrally managed network.

DSCI was based on open source and seemed like a good fit, but M5 had more "niceties" in its offering, Bolick says.

Among these were a flat fee for unlimited users, trans-office hunt group support, a unified numbering plan, redirection of calls to mobile phones and browser-based call control.