Become A Unified Communications Juggernaut

The winner of the Channel Innovator Award in the VoIP category is Juma Technology for its UC implementation at the international law firm of Hughes, Hubbard, and Reed. Prior to Juma performing the installation, the law firm was working with another integrator. According to Joe Fuccillo, prTesident and CTO of Juma, the other integrator was in the early stages of getting an in-office demo of equipment with full feature functionality set up for the law firm. However, the firm’s needs were fairly complex, and the integrator was having trouble executing. “The firm contacted hardware vendor Avaya and said that things weren’t going well with the project,” says Fuccillo. “Avaya recommended us, we were contacted by the firm and performed the demo.” Via a successful demo, Juma was able to show how a UC solution would be able to improve the firm’s business process, reduce expenses, and improve billing. Previously, the law firm was using a traditional telephone system in each of its seven branch locations. While the phone system still worked, the law firm was looking for a new system that would provide additional functionality to help improve workflow. Juma’s solution did just that.

The solution included more than 1,000 Avaya 9640 Gigabit color phones and dual mirrored servers. Juma also implemented Cisco switches and chassis in five branch offices, as well as a new Cisco 10 gigabit core and distribution switches in the firm’s main office. The branch locations are connected via the law firm’s WAN, enabling all locations to be interconnected and gain the advanced features and functionality operating at the headquarters.

Transparent features were configured on the new system, so if something happens on the data network, the users at branch offices would not be impacted from a telephony standpoint. Juma also replaced the underlying data network at all the locations to support VoIP, QOS (quality of service), and POE (power over Ethernet) requirements. At the headquarters, Juma replaced 12 Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches, totaling 4,000 Ethernet ports, over a weekend. The entire solution cost the firm approximately $3 million.

Of all the features and functionality, one of the most important to the law firm was the integration of Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC). MOC provides users with ‘click to dial’ functionality from Microsoft Outlook, shows if users are currently busy on the phone, and can be used for IM (instant messaging) among other things. Additionally, the MOC portion of the new voice and data solution was tied into the firm’s case management and billing software, providing more accurate billing of clients.

As Fuccillo points out, getting MOC integrated with the existing time and billing software is a good example of the challenges commonly faced in UC projects. “The challenge of UC is the heavy amount of integration,” he explains. “You have to do a lot of consultation and design to make the pieces work and take time to detail workflow and the customer’s business process.” For example, the law firm wanted to use ‘click to dial,’ but it also had a requirement to enter a time and billing code when a call is made which logs the call for billing/tracking purposes. The standard MOC ‘click to dial’ functionality wouldn’t work with the firm’s existing billing software. Had Juma not performed the proper discovery, there could have been an uncomfortable situation late in the implementation phase where the solution was found to be lacking, requiring a change order and additional work. To solve the problem, Juma performed custom programming to integrate code entry into the ‘click to dial’ functionality of MOC. The customization took about 90 days to complete at the firm’s expense — a cost Juma could have had to cover had the need been discovered too late. While the law firm was the first for which Juma installed MOC, many of Juma’s large customers have since adopted the platform, adding to Juma’s growth in 2009.