Partner Solution Case Study
/ IT Consulting Firm Helps Companies Provide Enterprise Voice Service to Reduce Costs
Overview
Country or Region:Germany
Industry:IT services
Partner Profile
Glück & Kanja Consulting AG focuses on enterprise IT infrastructures and communications solutions based on Microsoft communications, collaboration, and messaging technologies.
Situation
Glück & Kanja needs to ensure that it can offer customers the latest communications solutions.
Solution
Glück & Kanja joined the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Technology Adoption Programto gain insight into the product and provide feedback on product development.
Benefits
- Helps to reduce costs
- Helps to improve productivity
- Provides more flexible voice deployment options
Reuben Honigwachs, Consultant, Glück & Kanja
Based in Germany, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Glück & Kanja Consulting AG is one of Germany’s leading communications consulting partners. Glück & Kanja focuses on enterprise IT infrastructures and communications solutions based on Microsoft communications, collaboration, and messaging technologies. In November 2010, it began deploying Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to customers—with presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice capabilities—to help them reduce costs.
Situation
Founded in 1990, Glück & Kanja is today one of the leading IT consulting partners for enterprise organizations in Germany. In 2006, it began deploying communications and messaging solutions based on Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange Server for its enterprise customers. Its consultants have broad-based knowledge of IT infrastructure, along with expertise in security, messaging, and systems management.
For its customers, Glück & Kanja implements all communication capabilities, from instant messaging, presence, and conferencing to enterprise voice. It also creates proprietary solutions and develops applications based on Microsoft technologies, and provides monitoring and support of business-critical systems.
In addition, Glück & Kanja has developed custom applications using the developer tools and application programming interface of Microsoft communications technology. For one of its customers, a large tunneling technology provider, it developed the Stock Notification Bot, a communications-enabled business process (CEBP) application that sends an instant message to responsible and interested parties about equipment inventory levels. Using this application, people can more easily track stock levels and ensure that parts are available when they need them.
One area where Glück & Kanja expects to expand deployments in the near future is in the area of enterprise voice. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, the company has already configured voice solutions for customers who simply want to provide more robust conferencing to those who want to replace their aging private-branch exchange (PBX) systems with an enterprise voice solution. Glück & Kanja also helps its customers manage the technical and configuration issues related to integrating PBX systems into Microsoft communications solutions. It supplies and configures voice over IP (VoIP) and IP gateways that enable customers to use the voice, messaging, and telephony features in their Exchange Server and Office Communications Server deployments.
Solution
Glück & Kanja joined the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Technology Adoption Program.With the more flexible architecture and expanded voice capabilities in Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Glück & Kanja believes it can offer its enterprise customers more choices for providing communications capabilities at smaller branch offices to reduce the need for costly PBX equipment. It can also offer smaller customers an enterprise-style communications and voice solution at a fraction of the cost. Lync Server 2010 provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—as well as improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools.
For traditional data center deployments, Glück & Kanja can offer customers better choices for configuring their environment according to their requirements and budgets. Customers can run Lync Server in a fully virtualized environment, or they can collocate server roles on the same physical servers to reduce the amount of hardware they deploy. For large enterprise customers with many branch offices, Glück & Kanja can deploy a survivable branch appliance (SBA), which is based on cost-effective media gateways and hosts the Microsoft Survivable Branch Appliance software package. The SBA provides a public switched telephone network (PSTN) connection that continues to provide communications capabilities in the event of wide area network (WAN) failure. Glück & Kanja can also offer its customers their choice of IP phones, headsets, and web cameras that are optimized to work with Lync Server.
“With Lync Server, improvements in the voice quality are important to companies we work with who have large mobile workforces,” says Reuben Honigwachs, Consultant at Glück & Kanja. Customers with employees who travel frequently can use Lync Server instead of their mobile phones to make calls. For customers who want to use Lync alongside their existing PBX systems, Glück & Kanja can configure Remote Call Control so that people can place and answer calls through the Lync client rather than using their desktop phones. To provide voice-mail solutions, it frequently implements Exchange Unified Messaging for customers so that people can receive and manage both voice-mail and email messages through their Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client or play voice-mail messages through the Lync client.
Engineers at Glück & Kanja can use the Windows PowerShell command-line interface management tool to remotely manage and configure Lync Server. To help customers manage quality of service issues, it can use Call Admission Control for locations where customers experience bandwidth constraints. “With the Lync client, we have already experienced better voice quality and feedback for the user,” explains Honigwachs. “But Call Admission Control will definitely help us further adjust quality of service for those customers who need it.”
With the unified client in Microsoft Lync 2010, Glück & Kanja customers can access capabilities such as instant messaging, desktop sharing, and ad hoc collaboration and online meetings with a single click. With Activity Feed, they can provide or view enhanced presence information that includes a description of what projects they are working on, and through Rich Contact Card, they can see people’s pictures and view their managers and direct reports.
Benefits
With Lync Server 2010, Glück & Kanja can provide its customers with more flexible enterprise voice solutions that help keep employees connected while also helping to reduce costs. It can also provide connectivity and better quality of service for office locations and small businesses that previously lacked access due to size or bandwidth constraints.
Helps to Reduce Costs
By deploying Lync Server 2010, Glück & Kanja customers have more options for reducing costs, whether through the elimination of costly PBX equipment, reduced travel, or reduced mobile roaming charges. Many Glück & Kanja customers can also save money by deploying SBAs to replace expensive PBX systems with high maintenance costs at branch offices.
“One of our customers has already experienced a 50 percent decrease in mobile roaming charges through its deployment of Office Communications Server,” says Honigwachs. “It expects to expand this savings even further as its employees increasingly use Lync Server to communicate with the home office and other project sites, which means they will use their mobile phones much less frequently.”
With the ad hoc collaboration and online meeting capabilities available through Lync Server, its customers should also expect to see a reduction in travel, increasing their savings overall. Michael Breither, Member of the Board at Glück & Kanja, explains: “Microsoft Lync delivers significant savings in terms of both time and money, and it improves communication and efficiency for our clients. It also offers many advantages, such as a familiar user interface, ease of implementation, and a significant return on investment that enables us to build an excellent business case for our customers.”
Helps to Improve Productivity
Glück & Kanja customers who experienced productivity gains with Office Communications Server will see those gains continue. Some customers already expect an additional ten percent increase in productivity due to the Lync Server upgrade. Enhancements, like Activity Feed, make features available that people rely on daily to be more effective at their jobs. “Presence really shortens the time when it comes to getting decisions made and questions answered,” says Honigwachs. “When you add Activity Feed, you have that much more information to help you find a person who can get what you need quickly.”
Provides More Flexible Voice
Deployment Options
With more flexible deployment options to offer customers, Glück & Kanja sees that it has more opportunities to provide enterprise voice solutions to businesses of all sizes. “The survivable branch appliance is key for planning survivability at companies with multiple branch offices,” says Honigwachs. “Also, administrators do not have to manage complex hardware in the face of a WAN outage to maintain a voice connection.”
Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative and engaging and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.
For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to: