May 31, 2022

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions

I’d like to follow up last week’s blog post regarding VOSS Discover. Here are some real life use case examples of how organizations are working with VOSS to migrate their enterprise voice system to Microsoft Teams. VOSS Discover enables companies to analyze their existing PBX and telephony solutions as well as understand the gaps and likely issues to plan for when moving their voice platform to the cloud and to Microsoft Teams.

We’re currently supporting a number of organizations through this important business transformation, and I wanted to highlight two of these, to help showcase some of the challenges we are able to solve for our customers.

Real Life Use Case Example 1: Retail Organization – Head Office(s)

This retail organization has an on-premise Cisco Call Manager solution (CUCM) deployed, and is currently delivering telephony services to all eight of its main offices. There are circa 2,500 users on the service; a blend of office-based and remote staff.

The company decided to move its telephony solution to the cloud and Microsoft Teams, which was already in use for chat and meetings, giving users a single client for all of their collaboration and voice needs.

The Challenge

Support on the current Cisco service was up for renewal and several parts of the hardware that ran the service were close to obsolete. As a result, the company wanted to accelerate the migration plan to avoid any further investment on a soon-to-be-retired system.

The challenge the customer faced was getting information out of the existing system. This was originally installed and configured several years ago by a local reseller, so that the new cloud solution could be configured correctly and the migration project could be completed before the renewal was due.

The Solution

VOSS worked with the customer’s IT Team to export the data from the current PBX; loading and analyzing the data using VOSS Discover. VOSS produced a formatted report with configuration information and a gap analysis. What’s more, we ran this analysis offline so as to not impact the live service currently running on the PBX.

The Business Value

• Speed – getting a rapid analysis was critical given timelines were tight
• Accuracy – understanding the gaps allowed the customer to avoid possible delays and risks to the migration
• User experience – making sure the right configuration was identified, for moving to Microsoft Teams (features were not missed)
• Automation – the extract and discovery was fully automated, negating the need for a highly skilled PBX engineer or re-engaging with the local reseller

Real Life Use Case Example 2: Global Manufacturer – Transformation Project

This is a multinational in the manufacturing sector, currently running a mix of Cisco clusters for the main telephony network. It is complemented by an Avaya contact center, and a small number of Skype for Business servers in specific regions. There are circa 60,000 telephony users in total, and the company is in the process of consolidating and rationalizing this around Microsoft Teams as part of its cloud strategy and Microsoft 365 program rollout.

The Challenge

As part of the overall IT strategy to move to the cloud, the company wanted to rationalize old equipment, particularly desktop phones. They wanted to move to a more modern and hybrid work style, to embrace soft phones and to standardize on a set of end user services to improve productivity and reduce support costs. The challenge was how to clearly understand what services and features had previously been configured, given the multitude of disparate systems, large volumes of service data, and lack of available key engineers to make sense of it all.

The Solution

The company invested in a VOSS-led approach as part of a three phase plan. First, to get a quick understanding of the telephony estate to enable planning and budgeting (VOSS Discover). Second, to carry out a deep audit (VOSS Discover Plus) as the foundation for the various project work streams. Third, to automate the transformation and migration process itself (VOSS Migrate).

The Business Value

• Clear, understandable reporting – presentable to the senior management team
• A consistent analysis and language across the different multi-vendor systems in use
• The ability to grapple with, model and manage the large amounts of data involved
• The inclusion of usage, linkages, and other data into the analysis to get a complete picture of what was currently in use – with a view to rationalizing equipment, licensing and other costs
• For the first time, an accurate and end-to-end view of the complete telephone inventory

We are here to help

VOSS is currently working with organizations around the globe, each with a common goal. To migrate their voice platform to Microsoft Teams. However, each customer has their own unique set of migration requirements. VOSS is here to help you, no matter how challenging or complex your voice and UC environment is.

If you would like to discuss VOSS for Microsoft, your Microsoft Teams environment, or click to learn more about VOSS for Contact Center Management. To discuss your telephony migration requirements with VOSS, please contact us.