SMART Technologies invests in unified communications to help employees stay connected anywhere
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Global Technology Firm Transforms Collaboration Capabilities
January 15, 2010
Challenge
SMART Technologies develops interactive whiteboards and other collaboration tools to improve the communication capabilities of organizations around the world. In business for more than 20 years, SMART has eight global branch offices in addition to its Calgary headquarters.
The company has grown rapidly in the last several years and recently found itself operating out of eight buildings in and around Calgary. SMART’s executives decided to consolidate all of the approximately 780 Calgary employees into one new global head office to improve communication and reduce the expense of maintaining multiple offices.
Initially, SMART Technologies considered moving its old networking and private branch exchange (PBX) equipment into its new headquarters. But the operations team decided the move presented a unique opportunity to build a state-of-the-art network infrastructure that would improve business processes, enable application upgrades and address the company’s long-term goals and requirements.
SMART also needed to replace aging call centre technology that was no longer able to keep up with increasing call volumes.
The network build would be comprehensive, covering everything from switching to voice and wireless. SMART also wanted a solution that would rely on as few vendors as possible.
“When you’re looking at building an entirely new network, it’s a lot easier to deal with one vendor,” says Rod Taylor, senior manager of IS service operations for SMART Technologies.
“Pulling together switches from one company, firewalls from another, wireless from yet another and having to train our team on how to interface them all together was just not a situation we wanted to face. We also wanted top-of-the-line equipment from a vendor with an excellent reputation for performance and reliability and Cisco gave us that.”
Solution
SMART issued a request for proposals (RFP) to several major IT vendors. When the RFPs came back, Cisco stood out from the rest. “Firstly, they were cost-competitive,” says Shane Griffin, manager of enterprise systems at SMART Technologies. “They also had the only truly end-to-end solution, so we wouldn’t have to deal with any third parties.”
SMART selected Cisco for its network build and began planning the implementation in the spring of 2008. The network had to be finished by December 2008 when SMART was set to move into its new headquarters.
The core of SMART Technologies’ new network is formed by a pair of Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches. Both switches have fully redundant power supplies and supervisor modules. In the unlikely event that one switch goes down, the other switch will keep the network up and running.
The wiring closets in the new building house Cisco® Catalyst 4500 Series Switches. Catalyst 3750 switches provide Gigabit connectivity to all of SMART’s desktops. “We have a lot of software development in progress and we were running voice over the network, so we needed to have excellent bandwidth all the way to the desktop,” Taylor says. “In order to help ensure the network didn’t go down, we built in as much redundancy and failover capability as possible.”
Voice services are handled by five Cisco Unified Communications Manager servers. A pair of redundant servers supports most of the building’s employees. Three more servers were added to support SMART’s call centre.
Most employee handsets are Cisco Unified IP Phones 7945, with some Cisco Unified Wireless IP Phones 7921 mixed in. Conference rooms are equipped with Cisco Unified IP Conference Stations 7936 designed specifically for conference calls.
Some employees also have Cisco IP Communicator softphones on their PCs, allowing them to be productive when working from home or on the road.
“The softphones provide tangible benefits in terms of cost-savings and employee productivity,” Griffin says. “They help cut down on our long-distance charges and make it simpler for employees to receive calls and voicemail.”
SMART’s call centre relies on Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) solution and Cisco’s Interaction Manager (CIM) to support 250 call centre agents. CIM allows SMART to put chat sessions into the same queue as voice calls. Since implementing CIM, SMART has seen its chat session volumes increase rapidly, which improves the call centre’s efficiency.
A Cisco wireless LAN allows employees to stay connected anywhere they roam within the headquarters, and many employees use wireless handsets because service over the wireless LAN is much more reliable than cellular service inside the building.
Both the wired and wireless networks are secured by Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC), which allows SMART to set policies on all devices requesting network access. So, for instance, a laptop user without the latest Windows and antivirus patches would not be able to access SMART’s internal network until the laptop software was updated.
Results
Internal and external groups at SMART improved their collaboration through unified communications. Cisco Unity® unified messaging allows employees to access their email and voicemail from a single inbox.
The end-to-end NAC implementation allows the firm to secure its network better than in the past, improving both internal and external security. “We’re a programming shop, so we have a lot of employees who take their machines home and plug them in,” Taylor says. “With NAC, we can be sure the machines are coming back onto our network free of any security issues.”
SMART also implemented virtual LANs (VLANs) on its Cisco network. The VLANs, which the company had not previously utilized, have proven particularly useful to SMART’s product development team.
“The development team requires full access to their desktops so they can do their coding,” Griffin says. “That deviates from our corporate standard, so we’ve put them on their own VLAN for security purposes.”
The product development VLAN also allows the team to test software without potentially affecting the entire corporate network.
Since implementing Cisco’s UCCE in the call centre, SMART has eliminated its backlog of calls. Cisco, SMART’s IT team and SMART’s services department worked together to implement a scheduled callback feature for the call centre that allows customers to set up technical support sessions in advance and have an agent call the customer at the scheduled time. The call centre automatically hands the scheduled call times over to the agents.
“The entire IS team did a great job of selecting and installing a solution that not only meets our current needs, but allows us to evolve our internal and external communications in the future,” says Mike Battistel, vice president of information systems. “Our employees can communicate effectively from wherever they happen to be in the office, on the road or at home. And our customers can reach us in less time through a variety of methods. We view our new communications infrastructure as a significant competitive advantage.”
Next Steps
SMART intends to standardize on Cisco equipment at its eight global branch offices. By relying on one vendor’s equipment, SMART’s technology team will be able to monitor and manage its network centrally from its Calgary headquarters, allowing SMART to make better use of its IT personnel.
Deploying unified communications globally will also reduce SMART’s long-distance charges and improve intra-company communications.
“Eventually we’d like to have five-digit dialing within the company, anywhere in the world,” Taylor says. “The productivity gains from that alone would justify our investment.”
In the call centre, SMART plans to install Cisco’s Unified E-mail Interaction Manager which will allow e-mails to go into a universal queue along with voice calls and chat sessions, further boosting the call centre’s efficiency.
Finally, SMART is assessing Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers for its data centre. Designed from the ground up to support virtualization, Cisco UCS blade servers offer customers excellent performance and energy efficiency.
“We’ve been very pleased by the performance of our network and are looking forward to incorporating more Cisco equipment into our operations,” Taylor says. “Cisco has an excellent reputation for reliability, and dealing with one vendor for most of our technology needs has saved us both time and money.”
