* Case study: Lynden
Lynden is an Alaska-based shipping company moving freight over land, air and sea to serve some of the world’s most rugged environments. Looking to replace its patchwork of switches, multiple vendors’ PBXs and key systems, Lynden executives tapped telecommunications manager Ed Johnson and a group of representatives from Lynden’s operating companies to identify an IP system that would meet current and future needs.
Lynden’s 1,500 employees span a dozen operating companies and 70 sites, with a company location serving anywhere from eight to 110 people.
Lynden looked at multiple vendors, and selected ShoreTel. ShoreTel not only met the minimum set of requirements, but also impressed Lynden with its easy installation. In a statement, Johnson said: “I arranged to meet [our] IT guy… on a Saturday morning to swap the switch out for a ShoreGear-12… It turns out he had another appointment and tossed me the keys before he took off. So I put my grandkids to work plugging in patch cords. We finished the job in a couple of hours, and still had most of our Saturday left to enjoy. That’s real do-it-yourself capability!”
Another benefit of the distributed VoIP architecture was the easy-to-use location transparency. This helped a Lynden company expand some of its operations from the ports of southeast Alaska into the central part of the state. Says Johnson, “In an hour and a half, I established a presence for [Lynden affiliate] AML in central Alaska by simply renting a couple of phone numbers, terminating them on a couple of DID numbers, and building an auto-attendant that made it look like AML had people in both Fairbanks and Anchorage.”
Technophobic users “didn’t know they were using VoIP until I told them,” Johnson says. “Once a little training got them past the paradigm shift of seeing their phone on their computer screen, all they noticed were the wonderful new features.” Some employees had never used voicemail before, and seeing the messages in a unified inbox with their e-mail helped ease the transition.
Lynden’s demand on its WAN has also been reduced by putting DSL links in the smaller offices. Web traffic no longer has to go through the main Seattle office via the WAN, freeing up bandwidth that may ultimately be used by the ShoreTel voice network.
