AND 1

Recently acquired by American Sporting Goods, the basketball footwear and apparel company AND 1 has more than 20 percent of the NBA wearing its products. AND 1 is headquartered in Paoli, PA, and has offices in Portland, OR, China, Taipei, and Amsterdam. In addition to making basketball apparel, the company also runs the AND 1 Mix Tape Tour, featuring the nation’s top street basketball players, and has a full roster of NBA endorsers including Jason Williams, Stephon Marbury, and Rafer “Skip to my Lou” Alston.

“It is imperative that callers reach a live person when they call AND 1.”
- Adam Resnick, Manager of Network Operations, AND 1.

In mid-2004, AND 1 was using an outdated NEC analog phone system that was proving to be costly to repair, unreliable, and difficult to manage. Moves, adds, and changes were complicated and ate up the time of network operations staff. In addition, AND 1 was migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2000. To upgrade the existing NEC system, which was not compatible with the Microsoft product, would have cost the company more than $80,000. With much of its sales coming in the form of phone orders from its large network of resellers, AND 1 sought an absolutely reliable and full-featured business communications system that would integrate seamlessly with its enterprise applications.

“You could potentially lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue if the phone system fails for any length of time. The quality of the hardware and software is what convinced us to go with ShoreTel.”
- Adam Resnick, Manager of Network Operations, AND 1.

The ShoreTel implementation in Paoli, PA, and Portland, OR, took three weeks to complete. Beyond the quality and reliability of the ShoreTel solution, it also cost about half as much as upgrading the old NEC system. ShoreTel provided AND 1 with more than 170 ShoreTel Phones, both IP and analog, to capitalize on AND 1’s existing copper. Seven ShoreTel 120 Voice Switches reside in AND 1’s Paoli building; two more are deployed in Portland. A ShoreTel T1 Voice Switch provides high-density trunking to AND 1’s central office. A dedicated Windows 2000 server is used for voicemail, acting as the company’s interface to ShoreTel Call Manager, which seamlessly integrates the system with Microsoft^® Outlook^® on employee desktops. Other benefits include:

• Immediate cost savings  from day one, with a quick and seamless deployment, improved system reliability, and streamlined management tools that allow IT staff to make moves, adds, and changes in minutes.
• Saving of approximately $12,000 a year on dedicated point-to-point connections courtesy of the virtual private network (VPN) the company now runs between its Oregon and Pennsylvania locations, 
• Increased employee productivity thanks to the system’s tight integration with Outlook. A simple click of the mouse enables them to retrieve voicemail, manage email, and initiate multimedia collaboration sessions.
• ShoreTel’s browser-based management interface allows IT staff to manage the entire system remotely, including voice services, automated attendant, and desktop applications.

“Once we had the ShoreTel VoIP system up and running, everybody saw the benefits. It’s apparent to everyone that the system is far superior to what we had — we didn’t need to bother doing an ROI workup.”
- Adam Resnick, Manager of Network Operations, AND 1.