Hitachi Consulting

Hitachi Consulting is in the business of “enabling the agile and real-time enterprise,” which means being pretty quick and flexible itself. When the Dallas-based IT software specialist was spun off from its parent company as an independent entity in November of 2000, it was clear that the existing phone system was too rigid and disjointed to mesh the new company’s far-flung offices into a single, virtual resource pool.

“While all the offices had a common switch platform, the installations were done by local technicians who had their own way of doing things, so the system was not really the same at every site.”
— Michael Shisko, IT Director, Hitachi Consulting.

For the first six months, the organization stayed in its old offices and continued to share the existing infrastructure, which included a brand-new Avaya phone system. The IT team found itself administering 12 different and far-flung phone systems. Not only were different features enabled at various sites, but sometimes the same code was used for different functions. As a result, the firm’s highly mobile consulting staff had trouble using the phones as they traveled from office to office. And although there was a single management interface, it didn’t provide a single-system view.

“We knew we weren’t going to have resident IT staff at each office, which we were used to, so remote administration was important. We didn’t want anyone to have to go onsite to do anything.”
— Michael Shisko, IT Director, Hitachi Consulting.

A trial run in the firm’s Seattle office proved that the system was a good fit for Hitachi’s workforce. Knowing that the platform’s open, distributed architecture would make it easy to scale and grow across sites, the team at Hitachi decided to roll out ShoreTel at each new office. Its distributed architecture and intuitive management interface makes administration of the firm’s multi-site network simple. Moves, adds, and changes that used to require expensive service calls now can be done in minutes from anywhere via ShoreTel Director’s browser-based console. Other benefits include:

• Minimal downtime following the move to the new system as the solution’s intuitive end-user interface required virtually no training.
• The company’s highly mobile workforce and salespeople remain productive no matter where — or on what device — they are. They simply log in to the local network, and any calls made to their desktop extension follow them.
• With the ability to make conference calls on the fly, the firm can pull teams together quickly for consultation. Hitachi Consulting now makes heavy use of voice conferencing — some 140,000 minutes per month.
• Savings with nearly every long-distance call, as least-cost routing lets calls made to outside numbers that fall within the local dialing radius of a Hitachi Consulting office be routed over the IP network, bypassing the long-distance carrier.

“We have been saving $10,000 to $20,000 per month, every month, since we installed the ShoreTel system.”
— Michael Shisko, IT Director, Hitachi Consulting.