All Business
Author: Vanessa Jo Roberts, CDW
April 2010
Once Forbes decided its phone system needed an overhaul, it left nothing to chance – stripping down two legacy networks and replacing them with a unified communications platform.
When Scott Evon walked into his office at 60 Fifth Ave. on the day Forbes’ new Voice over IP network went live, he was ready for anything — well, almost anything. He wasn’t ready to have extra time on his hands.
The director of technology operations for the New York City media company had blocked out his entire morning to handle any major hiccups that might arise, but none did.“I’ve done several network upgrades — for big companies and campuses — but this is the first time I have ever seen a network cutover with this level of complexity and risk go so smoothly that the next morning after the cutover I had free time on my schedule,” says Evon.
Now, following a nine-week accelerated deployment that took place in late summer, Forbes has established a unified communications platform and outsourced the telephony management services. Evon and CIO Mykolas Rambus expect the new Internet Protocol backbone, coupled with third-party tech support, to drastically reduce systems maintenance overhead and also expand IT services available to employees.
“We are now more open and flexible about the types of tools that we allow our employees to use in their everyday lives,” says Rambus.
Although gaining savings by collapsing the separate networks at its two New York locations was a major driver behind the UC initiative, improving the technology tools available within the company was equally important.
“Frankly, we want to take advantage of all the tech trends that our audience, both now and in the future, can take advantage of — particularly when it comes to content,” points out Rambus.“People were consuming content in different ways and faster than our own employees were able to.”
Commercialization often drives technology adoption, according to Phil Hochmuth, a senior analyst for the Yankee Group. Unified communications creates a way for enterprises to more efficiently tap tools that individuals often acquire through service providers.
“The biggest benefits of UC are the integration of VoIP, presence, video and other services with line-of-business applications and with other services and apps,” says Hochmuth. “This allows for communications-enabled business processes, such as integrating an IT help desk and trouble-ticket application with voice, presence or even video.”
New Arsenal of Tools
Privately held Forbes has been a New York institution since its inception more than 100 years ago, when it launched its namesake business magazine. Today, it’s a worldwide operation, with employees spread among offices and bureaus around the globe creating content for the flagship publication as well as 10 foreign editions, a handful of other titles and several other online sites.
“Like the lights, the phone system has to work, and the ability to do video conferencing is a significant value add,” says Forbes’ Scott Evon.
“The flexibility of the platform and how we can use it to work more closely with our customers and our internal staff is the biggest win on this,” says Evon. In the same way that the conference call was innovative in its day, the ability for people in Forbes bureaus to use video and see one another will increasingly play a pivotal role in day-to-day operations.
Other capabilities also appeal to sales and business users, he notes. More and more, there are employees who telework, who are on the road or who need anytime, anywhere access to technology, he says.
“Our internal customers, the employees at Forbes, look at the phone system like a utility,”
Evon says.“Like the lights, the phone system has to work, and the ability to do video conferencing is a significant value add.We can be much more productive and work and collaborate as if sitting directly across from each other.”
UC tools such as simultaneous ringing on multiple lines and bringing up softphones on a notebook computer make the company’s staff much more available, he says.
Going For It
At the onset of the project, Evon and Rambus acknowledge that they had reason to be a bit on edge. For starters, they had to assuage senior management.
“Our general manager was frankly skeptical about the move to VoIP,” says Rambus.“ He’d heard earlier horror stories about installations and the garbled quality of the calls.”
What’s more, this was no simple VoIP deployment. It required setting a strategy for the services at Forbes’ storied headquarters as well as a second location, two blocks north at 90 Fifth Ave. There were two go-live dates on back-to-back weekends, first for the entire building at 60 Fifth Ave. and then a week later for the office up the street.
“All the work that we did, from planning and execution, paid off,” Evon says.
That planning work involved a team of pre-installation engineers doing a sweeping analysis of every bit of network technology deployed within Forbes as well as a node-bynode review of the private branch exchange (PBX) systems.
“One of the biggest challenges in New York is that many buildings are very old,” says Patrick Priest, a project manager for CDW Advanced Technology Services. There are typically a lot of cabling needs and issues related to power and cooling whenever anyone in the city wants to revamp a network, so the team assessed the Forbes buildings and both legacy networks to gauge their VoIP readiness. With those details in hand, the team worked with the Forbes IT staff to define the new VoIP and UC infrastructure (see “From Stem to Stern,” below).
Replacing the legacy networks required a ground-up retooling of the network infrastructure at 90 Fifth Ave. from the core of the network to the user core, a complete hardware upgrade and a revamp of all IP connections. The headquarters building had been upgraded two years earlier with Cisco gear that could handle VoIP, so it required only quality-of service tuning to prioritize voice and data traffic, says Ziyad Roumaya, a CDW network engineer.“We did do a lot of configurations and adjustments.”
The installation strategy called for running the new and old networks in tandem to shake out any glitches, avoid downtime and ease users’ adoption of the new phones (see “Put ’em at Ease,” below). And although the wiring closets were small, “we were able to rack and stack new hardware in the existing closets so that there wasn’t any downtime,” Roumaya says.
Dollars and Sense
Right from the start, Forbes can calculate some direct cost savings — from turning off several voice circuits, shuttering PBXs and converging voice, data and video pipelines.
“But the flexibility that it allows us to give our customers — the employees — is huge; that’s truly the long-term benefit for Forbes,” Evon says.
There’s also the savings on day-to-day systems maintenance. From the early planning stages, the New York media company weighed how it could most efficiently and cost effectively manage a unified communications platform.
Ultimately, it chose to outsource support, starting on Day 2.
Hiring additional staff to manage the environment did not seem like a viable option, Evon says. After all, they would have difficulty keeping their skills honed because they would not need to use them day in and day out.
By outsourcing management services, he points out that Forbes gains the bench strength and the facilities necessary to properly test new applications, manage patches, maintain patch documentation and monitor telephony activity.
“With any PBX environment, there are a lot of moving parts, and there’s a lot of skill needed to manage the platform,” he says.“We would rather focus our staff resources on new technology efforts to drive revenue and efficiencies.”The overhaul also has other intangible benefits, adds Rambus.
“It had the additional impact in this rough economic environment of showing people that we were investing in them and the physical infrastructure.”That’s not only a win for the company’s leadership, but it also has a “psychological impact” on the employees, improving morale, he says.
“And, oh yes,we saved money: The cost per unit went down.”
Put ’em at EASE
About two weeks before Forbes went live with a new Voice over Internet Protocol phone system, employees came to work to find these new IP phones on their desks right next to their old phones.
That really smoothed out the implementation, says Scott Evon, director of technology operations. It allowed each employee to continue to use the existing phone but also to call anyone inside the company on the new phone and to play with the features.
“That way, when we went live on the first day of service, none of it was new,” Evon says.
“That was absolutely one of the items as a best practice that paid off.”
What’s Up Next?
On the communications horizon for Forbes are its remote offices. Technology Operations
Director Scott Evon says IT is excited to extend its unified communications platform out to users beyond its two New York City locations.
“Now, we basically can provide an office in a box,” he says. “Your office is where you are —anytime, anywhere.”
How well that deployment goes will be a second measure of the successfulness of the UC initiative, he says. The IT team will be looking at how well the new Internet Protocol communications platform performs in the real world of roving employees, remote offices and virtual environments.
“This will prove really important for our business in a shrinking world requiring more collaboration anytime and anywhere,” Evon says.
From Stem to Stern
The Forbes unified communications rollout required a complete network infrastructure upgrade of switches and routers. Here’s what makes the new UC platform tick:
• Cisco MCS 7835 servers: Cisco Unified Communications Manager 7.13 (the VoIP PBX software) and Cisco Unity Connection (the VoIP voicemail software for voicemail boxes).
Additional servers were installed for N+1 redundancy, ensuring high availability of services.
• Cisco Catalyst 3750-E Series Switches: These Power over Ethernet switches provide a converged voice and data infrastructure to connected VoIP phones. The switches also provide quality-of-service features to prioritize traffic.
• Cisco 2821 Integrated Services Routers: The 2800 Series ISRs serve as voice gateways, bridging the gap between the traditional time-division multiplexing public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Cisco VoIP infrastructure.
• Cisco 224 Voice Gateways: The 200 series gateways serve as a bridge between traditional analog telephony and the Cisco VoIP infrastructure. For Forbes, the VG224 devices connect modems, faxes, elevator phones and other analog devices to the VoIP system, giving them access to internal extensions and PSTN numbers.
• IP phones: Administrators and executives received 7970G Unified IP phones, while all other users received 7945G models.
Article is reprinted with permission from BizTech, a CDW Publication.CDW, drawing on strategic partnerships with Cisco, IBM,Microsoft and many others, and the far-reaching experience of its hundreds of engineers, has assisted clients with a full range of technology solutions. For other information, please contact CDW, John Uchaker at 513-677-4119 or visit www.cdw.com
