Tech Talk: Unified Communications Helps Firm

By Elizabeth Wasserman

An Arizona manufacturer of car audio equipment, such as speakers and subwoofers, cuts costs and helps mobile workers stay connected by switching to a unified communications platform.

Audio manufacturer Rockford Corp., of Tempe, Ariz., has a workforce of 175 – 40 percent of which are mobile, including a sales team spread across the U.S. and in some international locations. Mark Swisher, director of IT, tells IncTechnology that empowering these mobile users and cutting technology costs were key drivers for investing in unified communications (UC).

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you invest in a unified communications platform?

Mark Swisher: The company, as the economy has changed, has gone through some reorganization. Years ago, we had 600 employees and I had 23 people in IT. Now we have 175 employees and my staff has been taken down to six people to manage IT for an $80 million company. My goal is to reduce our costs and I was looking to find a tool that was easier to use. Our sales force is very mobile. We have over 50 sales reps out in the field, working with dealers and stores that sell our products to end users. It's important to keep them in touch with our system. In the past, we used Novell GroupWise. We were incurring $63,000 a year in annual licensing fees. We were looking for something with a little lower overhead and not such a big annual cost so we went with Microsoft's Unified Communications and had it wrapped into our enterprise-level agreement, along with our renewal of our Office software. We outsourced the deployment to Ensynch, a local IT services firm to assure a smooth transition from Groupwise to Unified Communications, which really made the move seamless and painless. 

Wasserman: What can you do now that you couldn't do before?

Swisher: We've reduced the number of tools we need to support our workforce. Unified communications puts it all into one product. If you're on a mobile device, you can hook up to Exchange and get your messages. Wherever you are, you can call into the network and get to all your messages, all your faxes, all your meetings, and even instant message through this same product. It really simplified the support environment that we have to provide to the sales people in the field. They have iPhones, Windows Mobile 6 enabled phones, BlackBerrys. This simplifies our system internally. With Exchange, you can call in over the phone and it will read all of your emails and other messages back to you. This is great, especially when people are traveling and they can't get Internet access. It's a very efficient tool.

Wasserman: What was involved in upgrading to UC?

Swisher: The nice thing with the Exchange solution is that I could use the hardware we already had. We were able to load it on the server we already had so there was no investment in hardware. We went back to Microsoft to negotiate our enterprise agreement because we needed to renew our Office software anyway. The incremental cost to support a user with unified communications was approximately $60 a user per year. It's really cost efficient. We're looking at spending about $28,000 a year in additional support fees, which is a steal in my book.

Wasserman: How long did it take to upgrade and what results have you seen?

Swisher: We started doing the implementation in February and had it done in eight weeks. The results have been outstanding. It used to be we were constantly working on the servers and we would have outages on it at least once a week. We haven't had a single outage since we went to UC. We haven't lost an e-mail. We had a power problem where the entire block lost power recently. When the system came back up, it was like nothing happened. It basically does its own recovery. We didn't have to do anything. Users couldn't even tell the power went down.

Wasserman: How have your mobile workers reacted?

Swisher: They love this. A majority of users were already using Outlook as their e-mail client at home. It's easy to use. We have online training that Microsoft supplied with the migration. Users were allowed to go online anytime and train with the product. They love the conference scheduling and resource scheduling. We always used to have scheduling conflicts in getting projectors for a meeting, for example. With the new tool, we schedule it right online, it goes to the IT help desk, and we make sure it's there on the day it was scheduled. We do a lot of our business in the last two weeks of the month. It's the nature of the beast for car audio. The dealers really want to hear back from the sales reps as quickly as possible. Every sales rep has multiple stores they deal with. They need to hear their messages wherever they are and get back to the dealers as quickly as possible.