Beckman Coulter manufactures biomedical testing equipment systems, and their reason for implementing VOIP was the former: The need to replace very old equipment. The catch is that just about *all* of their legacy gear was very old, so the replacement program has run much faster than at the average enterprise.
I had a chance to talk to Steve Campbell, director of network services for Beckman, and he described their legacy PBX infrastructure as "somewhere between obsolete and ancient." Some boxes, like the company's Rolm 8000 and 9000s, went back 20 years, and in a company that had grown via acquisitions, there was a "large variety of equipment around the world."
So in 2003, Steve Campbell and Beckman launched the TIGER program, short for Telephony Infrastructure Global Equipment Rebuild. Four years later, the company has finished all but four sites in the U.S. and still has a few sites left in Asia to migrate. But otherwise, this 10,000-line project is near its completion, and Steve Campbell is feeling pretty good about things.
Architecture Beckman Coulter has 12 Siemens HiPath 4000s deployed in the U.S.; 2 more go in next year, and another 2 in 2009, at which point the deployment will be complete. The architecture is pretty well distributed; just 5 sites are remoted and don't have their own IP-PBX on site. Beckman Coulter's European offices, however, all run remotely off a single 4000.
The obvious question is why Beckman Coulter didn't go for Siemens' push for a centralized architecture built around the HiPath 8000, the big honking softswitch that Siemens adapted from a carrier box to one aimed at serving an entire enterprise from a single datacenter (mirrored for redundancy).
The answer is that Beckman may still go the 8000 route; Steve Campbell couldn't get specific except to say that, "It's on the radar for starting a project in 2009."
This in itself is interesting. Beckman Coulter is looking at a second generation of IP-telephony as much more of an extension of the current infrastructure, rather than the break from the past that most Unified Communications backers envision.
On another issue, most enterprises are finding that, as they scale IP-telephony deployments, the management challenges increase at something greater than a linear rate. Steve Campbell agreed that IPT management is tougher at scale, but said for Beckman, it's less a matter of having more problems than it is devoted more resources toward ensuring there are no problems. "We pay a lot more attention to network management today than we did pre-TIGER," he said. As they've garnered experience, however, "We've gained confidence in our ability to manage VOIP on our LAN and WAN."
When it comes to connecting sites over the WAN, Beckman uses some WAN acceleration and optimization technologies, but "I'd say there's no real substitute for bandwidth," Steve Campbell told me. "We have not been stingy with bandwidth allocation."
What users really like about the new system is that it's the same everywhere, and there's six-digit dialing among all offices that have been migrated. In the past, most offices' systems didn't work the same at all. "When you traveled to another site, you always had to find someone to explain the phone system to you," Steve Campbell said. Plus users now have features like Caller ID and more modern instruments with better displays.
Steve Campbell concedes that when it comes to integrating the new system with lots of IP applications and capabilities, "we haven't exploited that to any great extent on the current phone system." The one area where they have begun a major project is the contact center, an effort dubbed "Sabre Tooth," i.e., "a bigger, badder tiger."
Beckman Coulter's call centers in Miami and in Brea, CA, have gotten better CTI functionality as a result of the "Sabre Tooth" project, and the next step is an integration project under way to link the Credit (accounts receivable) department with the service and customer contact centers, which will represent a major step forward in Beckman's ability to handle customer issues more efficiently.
Lessons Learned Here's what Steve Campbell recommends, based on his experiences:
1.) Implementing IP-telephony requires a lot of planning, including early identification of strategic obejctives--what's the "guiding light" for doing the project?
2.) You need a comprehensive communication plan and philosophy, and you need to work side by side with the managers at each site where IPT is being deployed. That means working with facilities, HR, financial and all other key managers.
3.) Communicate with the employees. Beckman Coulter was even able to develop an internal marketing plan, and got help from the company's PR team to create collateral and even a little giveaway, a rubber tiger that could be tossed out at training sessions as a little prize.
4.) Finally: Intensive planning, "working out to an incredible level of detail all the steps you need to take."
A last point: Both voice and data staff within Beckman Coulter report to Steve Campbell, so the organizational approach was clear: "When we started the project, I declared that we were converged." He says the staff responded enthusiastically and most members viewed the new project as a positive career step.
