EDAW

EDAW Inc. calls itself “a firm without walls.” The San Francisco-based company provides landscape architecture and community planning services to public- and private-sector clients across four continents. Acquisitions in recent years have expanded the company to a 1,000-person workforce operating out of 15 domestic and nine international offices. Because the consulting business is highly mobile and communications-intensive, it is key to make integration among offices, mobile workers, and clients as seamless and location-transparent as possible.

“The Cisco solution required expensive upgrades to existing network hardware and staff skills.”
- Ron Pike, IT Director, EDAW.

As EDAW grew with acquisition, its IT team inherited a patchwork of incompatible PBXs and key systems to bring under the larger EDAW umbrella. Each site involved a separate service contract with all the associated overhead and hassle. Service was inconsistent, with EDAW reliant on outsiders for the health of its voice network. Simple moves, adds, and changes could take weeks. In addition, interoffice networkability did not measure up. The team’s challenge was a dual one: to create a business communication system using the existing data network, and to enable remote management on a single, unified platform.

“The ShoreTel server has a built-in testing tool and also provides us with a comprehensive call record that shows what kinds of calls are being made.”
- Ron Pike, IT Director, EDAW.

Unlike other solutions, ShoreTel’s open, distributed architecture unifies communications, enterprise applications, calendaring, and workflow into one seamless environment. Every part of the system — including PBXs, voicemail, auto-attendants, and ACDs — can be managed from the same browser-based interface, and IT staff can easily perform administrative tasks that previously required hourly calls from the local outsource. Other benefits include:

• Least cost routing between San Francisco and the Seattle office realizes cost savings. 
• Savings increase with every call: a built-in suite of versatile, real-time tools put flexible features, telephony and IM control, and collaboration services at employees’ fingertips.
• The ShoreTel system’s intuitive, real-time call handling features eliminate missed calls and games of phone tag by allowing users to see who is available, and to choose how best to reach them — by phone, IM, or email.
• ShoreTel call-control software distributes call processing across all the switches,  creating rock-solid voice services with no single point of failure and high availability.
• The IT staff can easily perform administrative tasks that previously required a service call. Moves, adds, and changes can be made in a matter of minutes.

“It would have cost us more in licensing fees to add similar capabilities to the Siemens platforms we already had, and we would have gotten less out of them.”
- Ron Pike, IT Director, EDAW.