Firm gets a better handle on international calls.
With headquarters in Singapore, Chartered Semiconductors Manufacturing’s U.S. sales, marketing and engineering teams log a lot of international miles and even more international calls. Trying to manage all those calls through the company’s two PBXs in California and Texas was proving to be an auditing and security nightmare for Ron Yan, the company’s IT manager in Milpitas, Calif., so he turned to VoIP.
With headquarters in Singapore, Chartered Semiconductors Manufacturing’s U.S. sales, marketing and engineering teams log a lot of international miles and even more international calls. Trying to manage all those calls through the company’s two PBXs in California and Texas was proving to be an auditing and security nightmare for Ron Yan, the company’s IT manager in Milpitas, Calif.
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“We had a function where an employee could call into the PBX and authenticate with a code and then call out internationally from there. But it was a big mess because you could only use one code so all 120 traveling users were using the same code,” Yan says.
It was impossible to track who was calling where, he says. “We had no way of knowing who was abusing the system. Also, if someone left the company, you couldn’t change the code, because there was no way to let everyone know the new passcode in a timely fashion.”
When Yan put out an RFP for a new communications system in 2004, he asked for “secure individual authentication that allows for access to be clicked off if they leave the company.”
The only option was VoIP, he says. Yan installed an IP telephony network comprising Cisco gear and LiteScape Technologies enterprise software that integrates with his Lotus Domino environment.
“Everyone is now on voice over IP; there’s no more PBX,” he says. “When users are traveling, they dial an 800-number that routes them to Milpitas. They can make calls anywhere in the world based on their access rights.”
Yan likes the ability to match travelers to calling rights because it cuts down on abuse and lowers overall costs. “I run reports every day on who is calling whom for how long,” he says. He also quickly cuts off access to users when they leave the company.
His users say they like the system’s new interface and unified messaging, which lets them access e-mail via voice mail and vice versa.
He’s also saving money because he negotiates a single international rate from Milpitas, which is better than individual phone rates.
