Transform Professional Services Firms with Unified

Communications as a ServiceDeliver Superior Customer Experiences and Change Your

IT Department from Cost Center to Revenue Center

Professional services firms are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing advances in IT. Because success for these companies is so dependent upon providing excel-lent customer service, it makes sense that IT professionals are focused on enabling exceedingly positive customer interactions.

Modernizing business communication and collabora-tion solutions are a key component to ensuring suc-cessful customer interactions. As noted by Deloitte in its “Business Services Outlook” report, companies that provide professional services should focus on the following initiatives to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace:

• EVOLVING BUSINESS MODELS THROUGH COLLABORA-

TION FOR DELIVERY OF COMPLEX SERVICES

• COST MANAGEMENT TO DEAL WITH PRESSURES ON

PROVIDERS FROM RISING COSTS AND TIGHTER MARGINS

• USING SOFTWARE-ENABLED SERVICES TO TACKLE THE

SKILLS GAP AND BOOST WORKER PRODUCTIVITY

Furthermore, Forrester contends that spending on tech-nology as it pertains to customer interests will outpace investments in classic back-office spending. Those include investments in software as a service solutions (SaaS) as well as consulting and system integration services, with companies relying more heavily on partners to grow and scale effectively, both in terms of user management and solution maintenance.

Cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions are an ideal way to address these issues. As profession-al services firms have felt the ongoing bite of constrained IT budgets, the pressure to reduce capital expenditures (capex) has opened the door for cloud services which boast a more flexible operating expense (opex) model.

Cloud collaboration in particular has proved an excellent fit for the way that professional services firms do business. Companies that span the professional services spectrum, such as consulting practices, financial institutions, and law firms, are uniquely positioned to embrace these new solutions. While these businesses typically maintain a fully staffed headquarters, they are also likely to have numerous satellite offices and a high percentage of remote workers who are in the field at customer locations, working from home, or on the road.

Because professional services companies tend to have large numbers of mobile employees, they rely heavily on smart phones and tablets, fueling growth in the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend and the rise of the virtual professional services firm.

With telecommuting and contract workers increasing-ly commonplace, the ability to quickly scale services as needed and provide a consistent set tools has become more important.

Unified communications (UC) combines enterprise voice PBX, voicemail, presence, instant messaging, audio, web and video conferencing, mobility and more. While some organizations may choose to deploy on-premises UC solu-tions, hosted UC services allow you to sidestep significant upfront capital expenditures and IT personnel exclusively devoted to day-to-day infrastructure management.

IT Outlook for Professional Services Firms

Evolve Through Collaboration

Reduce Costs

Innovate with SaaS

The Top Benefits of Cloud Communications

• Rapid scalability as new offices and workers are added

• A single unified platform with a consistent set of tools for all users regardless of location or device

• Easy and immediate updates, providing the latest tools to the team while minimizing the work and cost required of the IT team to roll out new versions

• In depth reporting data, spanning enterprise-wide analytics to individual usage reports

• Business continuity and disaster recovery options for keeping the team connected regardless of external events

• Global coverage and support

Hosted VoIP PBX services and collaboration tools keep mobile workers connected to the rest of the organization on a single, unified platform

across geographical boundaries and regardless of the device used – whether on a desktop, tablet or smartphone.

Cloud Migration Is Here

If you are thinking about migrating to the cloud, you’re not alone. Industry analysts cite cloud service models as a key reason for the downturn in the on-premises enterprise telephony market (i.e. having a PBX locat-ed onsite). Dell’Oro Group predicts that market will decrease by about 20% in the next few years as companies begin to move purchases to recurring expense models afforded by the cloud.

More and more companies are turning to the cloud to achieve their busi-ness goals. In fact, recent research from Intel revealed 93% organiza-tions are using some form of cloud services, while most said 80% of their IT budget will be committed to cloud solutions in the near future. And the UC market alone is expected to at a rate of ten percent, from $17BN to nearly $29BN, by 2021 according to MarketsandMarkets research.

Combined with collaboration solutions, hosted IP PBX services are changing the way workers interact with each other and with custom-ers. West, a six-time Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant Leader, has guided thousands of customers on the UCaaS journey with

VoiceMaxx CE, which builds upon and extends Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). Hosted in secure and geographically redundant data centers, VoiceMaxx CE has relieved professional services firms from the burden of day to day telephony management while helping IT departments transition from cost centers to part of the organization’s revenue generation engine – a truly powerful transformation.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM WEST, EXECUTIVES ARE TRANSFORMING HOW THEIR IT DEPARTMENTS OPERATE AND CHANGING THE WAY THEIR COMPANIES COLLABORATE.

80% of all IT budgets will be committed to CLOUD SOLUTIONS in near future.

93% of ORGANIZATIONS are using

some form of cloud services

Berkeley Research GroupGlobal Consulting Firm Ditches Dropped Calls in Favor of Stable and Scalable

Cloud Service

Berkeley Research Group comprises highly credentialed experts, prominent academics, CPAs, experienced business leaders, former government officials, and seasoned consultants with a deep understanding of economics, finance, statistics, public policy, and business strategy. Its experts regularly provide commentary on the most pressing and

complex issues in today’s marketplace.

“THE FUTURE OF IT MANAGEMENT IS TRULY TO FUEL THE BUSINESS. WE’VE EXPERIENCED ABOUT A 20% GROWTH IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS. TECHNOLOGY, FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, IS A KEY PART

OF THAT. IT ENABLES THE BUSINESS TO EXPAND BUT ALSO TO FOCUS ON THE CLIENTS.”

Chip Goodman, Berkeley Research Group

CHALLENGEBerkeley Research Group, employer of about 900 people in 40 offices around the world, was stuck on a VoIP system that was very rudimentary in terms of features and functionality. To make matter worse, they were experiencing issues with both scalability and stability.

“It (our voice calls) got very choppy, very jittery. And as our business continued to grow, it put more and more stress on the existing platform,” stated Chip Goodman, VP of Information Technology. “The platform also didn’t integrate well with Microsoft Outlook.” The issues went from simply annoying to business-impacting; with dropped calls, packet loss, and significant outages, quality of service was terrible. With BRG at risk losing business because of poor service, they began to take steps toward bringing much needed stability to their voice infrastructure.

SOLUTIONWest teamed with Cisco in proposing VoiceMaxx CE, which builds upon and extends the capability of Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), along with Maxxis, an application-aware MPLS network service that would boost the firm’s network performance and enhance the quality of the voice services. Cisco WebEx, Collaboration Meeting Room and InterCall conferencing services rounded out the proposal. Using an aggressive timeline, the West implementation team began migrating sites over from the existing phone and network service. All was going according to plan until the incumbent voice and network provider unexpectedly announced they would be cutting BRG’s remaining services earlier than scheduled, which would have left a good portion of the company without voice or data services for a week.

Within 24 hours, the West team rolled out voice and network services to the remaining locations, adding 11 locations, porting 500 phone numbers, and deploying 400 additional VoiceMaxx CE licenses to avoid any downtime.

RESULTSBRG strives to run an extremely lean operation, so selecting the right business partner is key. That’s why hosted unified communications is an excellent fit. VoiceMaxx CE and Jabber have reduced costs while also letting the company to grow quickly and securely.

Goodman explained, “It allows us to scale our business effectively while gain-ing support and engineering services that we don’t have in house.” BRG also appreciated West’s redundant data centers and liked having voice, data and internet traffic all on a single, reliable network. Down the road, they plan to work with West to implement Active Directory integration as well as call flow and contact center functionality.

At any given time, several consultants are out in the field and onsite at customer locations. Now, BRG’s consultants are able to work from anywhere, instantly connecting with colleagues and clients from around the globe whenever needed using voice, IM, video, and desktop sharing. He continued, “Our experts are able to collaborate more than they have in the past. Whether it’s collaboration using instant messaging, video, and obviously voice, with the Jabber client loaded on laptops, smartphones and tablets, they’re able to connect to their colleagues and their clients anywhere in the world.”

“COMPARING THE FEATURES, THE FUNCTIONALITY, THE SECURITY, AS WELL AS THE DIRECTION AND THE ALIGNMENT OF OUR COMPANIES, WEST WAS THE OBVIOUS CHOICE.”

“WE WANT TO ADOPT AND EXTEND STATE OF THE ART TECHNOLOGIES THAT SOLVE THE BUSINESS PROB-LEMS NOT ONLY FOR US, BUT FOR OUR CLIENTS.”

“WEST IS AN INTEGRAL BUSINESS PARTNER FOR THE FIRM AND PART OF OUR BUSINESS. WE’VE GOT A GREAT BUSINESS PARTNER THAT WE CAN LEVERAGE AND SCALE TO OUR BUSINESS.”

Chip Goodman, Berkeley Research Group

Nationally Recognized Law Firm Modernizes Communications and

Frees Up IT Staff

CHALLENGE This large full-service law firm with several hundred employees represents clients throughout the country and abroad with a diverse client base that spans individuals, businesses and government entities. Despite being a high profile law firm, the company’s various offices relied on multiple unreliable and outdat-ed on-premises PBXs. With only a small IT staff, the company was interested in easing the daily management responsibilities and moving to a single, unified platform.

The firm’s leadership began to assess their enterprise voice options, but they also envisioned a communications strategy where they could conduct business easily and professionally via video in order to reduce travel related expenses. Another IT concern was their ability to send large amounts of data over their network. With their current network already stretched to the limit, they knew would need a better solution to achieve their voice, data transport, and video aspirations.

SOLUTION After exhaustively researching their options, the firm’s leadership made the decision to move to the cloud. With a cloud service, the firm would always have access to the latest, most advanced tools, but wouldn’t have to handle day to day management or updates to the system, which was ideal for their small IT staff.

The company issued an RFP to a few of the major providers identified during their research. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) pointed them to West, a Leader in the annual report several times over. The VoiceMaxx CE platform was appealing because of its flexi-bility and security, as were the robust UC features with Jabber. The ability to integrate with WebEx video and InterCall conferencing was a critically important bonus.

West’s Maxxis network solution was implemented to handle the existing large amount of data that was already being sent over their network, and the solution easily expanded to include their voice and video traffic as well, providing flexible Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure voice quality would be at peak performance.

RESULTSINSTEAD OF WORRYING ABOUT CALL QUALITY, DROPPED CALLS OR MANAGING DAY TO DAY TELECOM MATTERS, THE IT TEAM CAN NOW FOCUS ON PROJECTS THAT ALIGN WITH THE OVERALL BUSINESS STRATEGY OF THE FIRM. AND THE NEW MAXXIS NETWORK SOLUTION RELIABLY SCALES TO HANDLE BOTH THE EXISTING AND ADDED NETWORK TRAFFIC. THE VALUE OF RECEIVING VOICE AND NETWORK SERVICES FROM A SINGLE VENDOR, ALONG WITH THE STRONG TIES BETWEEN WEST AND CISCO, DEMONSTRATED A COMPELLING LONG-TERM VISION THAT OTHER PROVIDERS COULDN’T MATCH, ACCORDING TO THEIR CIO.

As a natural cadence of their business, the firm often has fluctuation in staffing levels. During larger marketing campaigns, the company has to scale to han-dle an increased workforce – and West’s VoiceMaxx CE easily accommodates. New users are easily added on the fly, either using the self-service online portal or with assistance from West’s UC Support team, and platform upgrades are handled seamlessly.

The company has gone on to implement a hosted contact center solution from West to better serve their customers. It’s currently staffed with 10 full-time agents and the plan is to expand significantly in the near future.

Ensafe Leverages Existing Cisco Investment to Quickly Migrate

to the CloudEnSafe is a global provider of environmental, health and safety, engineering, and technology solutions.

Founded in 1980 and headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, has offices in cities across the U.S. Specialties include Environmental, Engineering, Health and Safety,

EHS and GIS Technology.

CHALLENGEEnSafe was facing many issues with their old phone system. Their Cisco hardware was outdated and approaching end of life. They were also experiencing call quality issues, including jitter and call drops. Some-thing had to be done to address the mounting issues, so the company began to investigate on-premises versus off-premises options.

Lee Moseley led the initiative to replace the current system for Ensafe. “With the help of my Cisco representative, West was brought to the table as a provider that could leverage Cisco technology, and me being familiar with Cisco—that sat well with me.”

SOLUTIONSince EnSafe already had an investment in Cisco equipment, it made sense to go with VoiceMaxx CE, West’s hosted voice platform that includes Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS).

“It’s backed by Cisco. We already had end points. We already had phones and switches and routers that were all Cisco-branded, so I wanted to keep everything in the same family. Everything that West was able to give us just folded right into our current infrastructure,” Moseley remarked.

THE ENSAFE TEAM APPRECIATED THAT THEY WOULD SAVE MONEY BY NOT HAVING TO REPUR-CHASE PHONES OR ANY ADDITIONAL INFRASTRUC-TURE. AND THE MOVE FROM ON-PREMISES TO THE CLOUD WAS EXTREMELY SMOOTH. IN FACT, MOSELEY SAID, “WE ALMOST LITERALLY PLUGGED IN A WEST CIRCUIT AND STARTED MIGRATING SITES.”

RESULTS“Today is VoiceMaxx CE covers all of our office locations. We’re also using West to take over and manage our entire network,” he contin-ued. “When it’s all said and done, we will have saved more money. We have the ability to upgrade our bandwidth at a lower cost than what our other vendor was providing us. We have a support system that’s 24/7, 365 that monitors proactively all of our pieces of network that they’re allowed to manage. From an IT perspective, that’s invaluable. From an end user perspective, do you take for granted being able to pick up a phone and getting a dial tone and dialing out? We used to have problems with something as simple as that. Those are a thing of the past.”

The West solution has provided EnSafe one heterogeneous environ-ment that allows them to leverage all of the technology they need while allowing their IT department to almost forget about what’s going on. Moseley stated, “It’s a set it, forget it type mentality, so we can focus more so on our internal employees and how we can help them better do their job.”

“WE HAVE A SUPPORT SYSTEM THAT’S 24/7/365 THAT MONITORS PROACTIVELY ALL OF OUR PIECES OF NETWORK THAT THEY’RE ALLOWED TO MANAGE. FROM AN IT PERSPECTIVE, THAT’S INVALUABLE.”

Lee Moseley, EnSafe

Medical Staffing Company Relies on IM and Presence to Keep

Colleagues Connected

CHALLENGEThis US-based healthcare staffing organization provides skilled medi-cal professionals to hospitals and clinics. The firm had over 30 branch locations, each with its own phone system. With plans to grow, the company knew they needed to consolidate the disparate communica-tion systems onto a single platform, but didn’t want to hire extra staff to implement the initial project and manage it on a daily basis.

The company also didn’t have a standardized instant messaging appli-cation. A critical feature request was an enterprise-grade IM solution that integrated with their Microsoft Outlook Calendar presence so staff could instantly see each other’s availability. Because cost was a concern, a cloud approach was determined to be more affordable and offered a predictable monthly expense.

SOLUTIONBased on results from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, the company reached out to West. VoiceMaxx CE provided single, unified voice platform that included the UC features they wanted. Workers could instantly connect via Cisco Jabber IM and easily transition to a voice call via the softphone capability, creating a more collaborative and connected experience.

VoiceMaxx CE’s scalability could accommodate their aggressive growth plans without hiring new or dedicated IT personnel, and additional offices and workers could be set up as quickly as needed. The com-pany could also leverage WebEx for internal or customer meetings and training sessions, along with integrated InterCall audio conferencing. Instead of blanketing the branches with full-profile users, West worked with the company to keep costs down. Taking each of their workers into consideration, West determined which feature sets individuals would need from the system so their requirements matched up to the various licensing bundles available.

RESULTSThe company appreciated West’s personalized approach, from onsite visits and tours of West’s facilities, to the time taken to tailor user-specific profiles in order to get the most value at the best price. NOW WORKERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY, NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE OR WHAT DEVICE THEY ARE USING, CAN QUICK-LY AND EASILY STAY CONNECTED THANKS TO THE INSTANT MESSAGING CAPABILITIES, AS WELL AS THE INTEGRATION OF PRESENCE INFORMATION WITH OUTLOOK.

The Cisco-centric approach with Jabber and WebEx, with an eye for expanding to into video down the road, made working with West an easy choice. West’s professional services team worked with the company to federate Jabber with a partner organization that was using another IM platform. And the CIO is thrilled to be able to leverage the West support team 24/7/365.

“THEY KNOW THE INS AND OUTS OF

OUR BUSINESS. THEY REALLY ARE PART

OF OUR TEAM.”

ZS Associates Unites Thousands of Global Employees, Fostering a

Collaborative Environment for a Mobile Workforce

ZS Associates is a privately owned American consulting company with more than 3400 employees serving a wide variety of industries, including pharmaceutical, retail and financial services. Headquartered in Evanston, Illinois,

the company has eleven North American offices, six European offices, and five offices in Asia. The company consistently ranksamongst the top consulting firms in the US.

“OUR IT TEAM HAS TRANSITIONED TO MORE OF A VENDOR MANAGEMENT SCENARIO, AND ALLOWS FOR MORE INNOVATION RATHER THAN REACTIVE AND DEALING WITH THE DAY TO DAY GRIND.”

Mark Kocour, CIO

CHALLENGEZS Associates provides consulting services all over the globe, so its work-ers are rarely in one place for long, much less at their desks. Faced with a rapidly expanding workforce, with thousands of new employees added over the course of just a couple of years, keeping in contact and collaborating effectively was a top priority.

ZS was looking for a way to unite their employees across the globe with an easy-to-use communications platform that included instant messaging and presence, coupled with a softphone that incorporated video functionality. Since they have a tremendous amount of mobile employees, and due to the nature of their business, the company needed its workers to be able to stay in touch no matter where they were.

To make matters more complex, ZS had a smaller IT staff that juggled the day-to-day management of the entire global IT infrastructure. And the organiza-tion also had to contend with the approaching end-of-life of their on-premises Cisco CallManager solution. The company needed a collaboration platform that could quickly accommodate new workers, and connect offices and remote employees around the world, so they began to investigate their options.

Like many organizations, ZS turned to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant during their research process, a trusted resource for identifying potential vendors and analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Within the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) report, ZS pinpointed some top candidates for cloud-based UC services, including West. The firm had briefly considered keeping their telephony platform on-premises, but a cloud model afforded them the flexibility they wanted, the ability to scale quickly, and would yield an easier to manage option for their IT team.

SOLUTIONThe West team provided a total cost of ownership comparison demonstrating the value of hosted services versus on-premises. The model offered a predict-able op-ex spend and ZS would experience further costs savings by leveraging their existing Cisco infrastructure investment.

ZS selected VoiceMaxx CE from West, which includes the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) had the robust feature set that ZS was looking for from a collaboration platform, with mobility functionality and video confer-encing. VoiceMaxx CE would enable ZS to quickly add new users, and the

solution could also be customized for the needs of different types of users.

RESULTSTHE EXPERTISE OF THE WEST TEAM PROVED VITAL TO ENSUR-ING A SMOOTH TRANSITION. WITH CAREFUL GUIDANCE FROM A DEDICATED PROJECT MANAGER, ZS MIGRATED FROM THEIR ON-PREMISES SOLUTION TO THE NEW, CLOUD-BASED MODEL. IT WAS A SEAMLESS MOVE WITH MANY EMPLOYEES UNAWARE OF THE CHANGE GOING ON BEHIND THE SCENES.

Using Jabber within VoiceMaxxx CE, their mobile workforce is now able to collaborate on the fly, whether at their desks or on their mobile phones. Tight integration between the Jabber application and WebEx has boosted collabo-ration in a more unified way than ZS has ever experienced, making it a perfect fit for their on the go workforce. And the ZS IT team appreciates that over the years, upgrades will be expertly handled by West, ensuring that the latest versions are always deployed, without additional costs and at much faster pace than on-premises.

“As life becomes more complex, the cloud enables workers to have much more flexibility in their lifestyle by providing remote capabilities,“ stated CIO Mark Kocour. “And the West team is a perfect complement to our technology personnel.”

“ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT OUR EMAIL AND TELEPHONY SOLUTIONS. WEST MANAG-ES EVERYTHING FOR US, AND IT IS DEFINITELY MANAGED WITH A LOT OF TALENT.”

“THE CLOUD MIGRATION PROCESS WAS PAINLESS. A LOT OF OUR USERS DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT WAS HAPPENING.”

Mark Kocour, CIO

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON SERVICES FROM WEST UC,

CONTACT US AT 855.544.0455