United States Army Corps of Engineers

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been the nation’s engineering problem-solver since 1775. The Huntington District covers 45,000 square miles — more than half of West Virginia and Ohio, and portions of Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. Communication is key to all army operations, but this is doubly true in rural districts such as this, where the local communications infrastructure is not necessarily state-of-the-art. About half of the district’s 1,000 employees are in the Huntington headquarters; the rest are spread across 49 remote sites and one floating repair vessel fleet. 

 “We were paying Verizon for Centrex, plus the GSA [General Services Administration] was taking its cut. It was really eating us up.”
- Robert Hall, Coordinator of Voice and Data Communications, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District.

Huntington District’s legacy voice system consisted of ISDN lines connected to Centrex service. It wasn’t a flexible architecture, and the phone bill for the district office alone was exceeding $30,000 per month. The time it took to get the phone company to make any changes was costing them, too — the average wait was two weeks, and sometimes much longer. Huntington District decided to install its own ISDN PRIs from a competitive carrier and find a phone system that could be managed internally.

 “If we can get the reliability of a standard telephone line and still install this kind of VoIP system — extremely reliable, simple to use, and easy to configure, install, and support — it’s a win-win situation.”
- Robert Hall, Coordinator of Voice and Data Communications, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District.

In ShoreTel, the Huntington District found a system that is both scalable and reliable, and as easy to deploy as it is to use. The Huntington District began its migration to IP by moving the IT group to the ShoreTel unified communications system. This pilot, involving a single ShoreTel switch, convinced the organization to convert its entire district headquarters facility — some 630 phones — to ShoreTel. The implementation teams had four people: one did the computer work, two installed the phones, and a fourth was charged with moving the wiring closet connections from the legacy key computer lines to the ShoreTel switches. The average office of 30 people could be implemented before lunch. Other benefits include:

• ShoreTel Call Manager offers users throughout the district powerful unified messaging tools. The single distributed system lets them reach each other via four-digit dialing across sites, or to dial by name from Outlook.
• Least-cost routing saves money by letting internal calls ride the IP WAN for free; bypassing long-distance carrier networks reduces recurring monthly costs.
• With system management streamlined through ShoreTel Director, the district no longer has to depend on an outside service. Adds, moves, and changes can be handled in minutes, not weeks.
• Overall, the new unified communication system has reduced recurring monthly costs by 70 percent. The ShoreTel system paid for itself in under 18 months.

“The installation went even more smoothly than we expected, and just about everyone in the building commented that it was the most painless upgrade we’ve ever done.”
– Robert Hall, Coordinator of Voice and Data Communications, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District.