Master Financial

Strong business lessons

Few companies doing VoIP have faced issues on a scale that Lehman has. But smaller firms also are learning the VoIP ropes. Chris Mullins, CIO at Master Financial, shares three lessons his Orange, Calif., firm has learned from its venture into VoIP.

1. Converged applications boost productivity, the bottom line.

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Introduction Lehman Brothers Master Financial

Few companies doing VoIP have faced issues on a scale that Lehman has. But smaller firms also are learning the VoIP ropes. Chris Mullins, CIO at Master Financial, shares three lessons his Orange, Calif., firm has learned from its venture into VoIP.

1. Converged applications boost productivity, the bottom line.

When Master Financial decided to make the VoIP plunge, plunge it did. The 350-person company - about the size of a minor branch office in a firm such as Lehman - threw out not only its old phone systems, but also the phones themselves. Master Financial recently replaced Avaya key telephone systems in its Denver; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Orange offices with dual, redundant Sphericall IP PBXs from Sphere Communications. Instead of deploying slick, new IP phones to all desktops, the firm decided on software-based phones, or softphones, from Sphere. "Over a three-day weekend, we took out all the Lucent/Avaya phones in the offices. On Monday, everyone came in and had no phone on their desks," Mullins says.

The Sphericall server pair, which runs in the company's data center in Orange, connects to a unified messaging server application from Sphere. The application, CallExpress, combines voice mail with Microsoft Outlook e-mail to give all employees one PC in-box for voice mail and e-mail, Mullins explains. Unified e-mail, voice mail and faxing let agents handle more applications and get documents to customers more quickly.

Plus, by integrating the IP telephony software with a custom-developed loan-processing application, Master Financial has let call agents access customer data and handle loan processing more quickly. Mullins says the firm has cut the number of days it takes to process a loan by 10 on average and increased the number of loans handled monthly by 40%.

2. Long-distance is cheap, but VoIP is even cheaper.

One eye-opening moment for Mullins was when the company went through its first month on the Sphere system without getting a pile of telecom bills from the three carriers it once used. "The per-minute rates for long-distance is cheap. But they get you on the taxes, access fees and line charges," Mullins says. Now, with all voice collapsed into one data center, Master Financial has only one carrier. "We ended up saving about $30,000 to $40,000 per month on local and long-distance charges," he says.

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3. IT control is key.

To keep its converged network running smoothly, Master Financial has standardized on hardware and software and strictly controls what users can do with their machines.

The firm uses Dell PCs and servers, which gives Mullins one source for support. Because the PCs on each desktop also are an employee's only telephony tool, maintaining the machines' stability is paramount, Mullins says.

"Keeping everything the same is a challenge, but it's worth it," he adds.

Master Financial uses software to block users from adding unapproved applications to their PCs. It distributes updates for the homegrown loan-processing software or the IP softphone clients through automated downloads.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.