BKF Engineers

Since its founding in 1915 by Willis “Jack” Frost, BKF Engineers has become Silicon Valley’s largest engineering firm. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, BKF also has offices in San Jose, Walnut Creek, and Pleasanton. BKF specializes in services not offered by many area firms such as hydrology studies, reclamation, design for bay mud settlement and hillside challenges, mixed-use development, traffic signal design, and condominium mapping.

“Calls can be pushed to and from the operators in the other three offices as if everyone were in one building.”
— Derrick Crandell, Director of Information Technology, BKF.

As BKF approached its second century, it did so with an old phone system that would often frustrate rather than facilitate contact. The IT team at BKF had several criteria for their new business communication system: reliability that included site independence; least-cost routing among sites; unified communication tools to enable features such as dial-by-name across the entire network; the ability to accommodate both analog and IP phones; and streamlined management from a single location.

 “We now understand our voice system and can control it.”
— Derrick Crandell, Director of Information Technology, BKF.

The ShoreTel network went live at all four BKF sites in April of 2001. Initially, no voice-traffic prioritization was done to the Cisco 2610 routers, and there were no complaints about voice quality. However, BKF is constantly moving big CAD files around the T-1 network, so the IT team added a margin of safety by giving voice traffic enough prioritization for five or six simultaneous calls. System deployment and maintenance tasks are simplified through ShoreTel Director, while ShoreTel Call Manager gives end-users powerful communication tools, including rich media, advanced mobility, and presence. Other benefits include:

• Significant reduction in costs organization-wide thanks to streamlined system management that eliminates outside service calls, thereby saving a minimum of $150 per move, add, or change.
• Least cost routing reduces BKF’s toll charges by more than half.
• After getting hit twice by California’s infamous “rolling blackouts,” BKF installed an offsite data center funded by the return on BKF’s investment in the ShoreTel system.
• Powerful, integrated features of ShoreTel Call Manager enable mobile and off-site users to make and receive calls transparently as though they were at their desks, which is essential for many BKF employees working on-site with clients.

“The ShoreTel system has paid off for itself already, and saved more than $65,000 per year.”
— Derrick Crandell, Director of Information Technology, BKF.