- Client: C-K Associates is an employee-owned, multi-media environmental consulting firm that has been serving the needs of industry across the Gulf South since 1981. They currently have offices in Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Shreveport, and Houston, TX.
- Situation: After they bought and ran a Cisco Call Manager system for over years, C-K Associates realized that necessary upgrades to the phone system were very expensive — almost to the tune of doubling the cost of the system over time. In addition, the specialized support an maintenance price was up to 35% of the cost of the system annually.
- Solution: Instead of upgrading the Cisco Call Manager to the next version, C-K Associates replaced the entire system with industry leader ShoreTel’s IP Phone System. With local switches in each location, they were provided guaranteed up-time in branch offices independent of headquarter up-time. The combination of MPLS and PSTN routing enabled each office to share trunks amongst each other and have free inter-office calls, which lowered the phone bill. Due to a simple and robust architecture, the voice quality in the branch offices improved immediately and the reliability increased significantly.
- Benefit: All users received a new state-of-the art, simple-to-use and feature rich telephone. The new phones allowed gigabyte speeds on the network, thereby increasing the network speed by 10x. The system became much more resilient to outages in any office. Significant savings in terms of free inter-office calls were brought in. For the cost of a minor upgrade to Cisco, C-K Associates got a brand new phone system with best in industry features like: an easy-to-read high-contrast display, a full-duplex speakerphone, and an integrated headset jack.
