MacArthur Co  

Why Qwest?

" Well, the reason we chose Qwest and Cisco was in the course of evaluating other providers, we discovered that Qwest already had the service that we were looking for, and being that we were a Qwest customer, it made sense to go down the Qwest-Cisco route.

One of the things we also discovered was that the Cisco phone system really fit into what we were trying to accomplish, which was if somebody calls us, whatever time of the day it is, if we have a branch open, we could route that call and get that person one-on-one personable service.

Part of the reason we went with the Qwest-Cisco solution was because we saw it fulfilled our network needs today, but it fulfills our phone system needs tomorrow. "

Implementation/Installation

" The initial implementation was—MacArthur's on Integrated Access with FlexOne [Qwest® OneFlex® Integrated Access service] and in a number of these sites—in 22 of those sites, we had Siemens routers and we needed to swap those out for the Cisco equipment.

In those cases, we went out on site to the first one, we installed the Cisco router; there were a few bumps and bruises along the way—we ended up getting a Cisco tech case opened up and we also had to get IronPort in place—IronPort's another product that does our proxy service—and it took us about seven hours to get that one up and functional.

From there, we rolled out another site—I think we had it up in 10 minutes, and from there it was—we were pretty much boxing up the remaining 21 routers out to the other locations.

We shipped them out, we sent along documentation, and we talked the end users through how to hook them up, and with Qwest's help we had them all on the integrated management system by the 29th of January. The Qwest training has been awesome. There's definitely no doubt about it—they made it fun, they made it easy to understand.

You know, people kind of walked out of training and were like 'That's it?' And it's really—they made the equipment seem that easy, not only from, you know, the end user who's just answering the phone, but for the person who's trying to do the special features—the call forward, the conference pieces, the using the directories and things.

They made it easy for me to understand how to add, remove, delete users; moving people from one office to another; swapping in and out equipment. There really isn't anything about this system that feels difficult anymore. "

Overview of Solution

" Well, MacArthur's roughly 35 sites. We were looking—we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 pieces of equipment on our network and it supports somewhere between, I'm guessing, 450 to maybe 500 users total, and we use Qwest service wherever we can.

We have a 20-meg line, which is our Internet connection in the Twin Cities. All of our branches connect back to St. Paul using Integrated Access, FlexOne [Qwest OneFlex Integrated Access service]—actually, 28 of those sites are; there's a couple of sites that're just MPLS. And something new that we're doing right now is the IA Private Port, which is basically Integrated Access with MPLS, and we're gonna be rolling those out very shortly.

Qwest also provides us integrated management, and that integrated management covers the 22 routers we purchased from Cisco; it also covers a 3845 Cisco router; there's a couple of 5520 firewalls. Those, in turn, support our IronPort solution, which is also—we purchased it just before Cisco had it.

There are three phone systems—there's three servers with our phone system, the 7825s; there's a pub, a sub, and a Unity server. There's a VG224 that we purchased through this.

All of our phones are 7941s and 7961s; they're not the ultra-high end, but they're not the lowest, either. But the functionality that they bring is so far beyond what we had it's absolutely incredible. Everybody loves their new phones—in fact, our end users are learning to do more things than I ever intended to teach them. "

Measurable benefits

" For myself, I'm probably saving easily 10 to 12 hours a week that I don't have to spend on the phone dealing with some kind of network outage anymore.

Right now, if a branch calls another branch and you're on the Integrated Access, there's no long-distance fees. We make a lot of phone calls between branches and so we'll just assign a St. Paul number to our Little Chute branch and immediately we've eliminated a ton of long-distance calls to that branch. Anytime they dial an outside line to go to a long-distance, they're gonna come straight through St. Paul.

They dial a local number, it'll still show up on a caller ID to the local service as somebody in town, so I mean there's huge benefits in being able to do that not only in this branch, but in several other little offshoot branches going forward.

As we started looking at MacArthur as a whole, we really realized that we spent an awful lot more a month than we probably realized, and what we were able to do was we're saying 'Look, we're willing to guarantee a larger number to Qwest per month in order to renegotiate our contracts, and in one case we actually saved ourselves 1,000 dollars a month on our 20-meg line just right off the cuff from the beginning of the year, which for this year, you know, 12,000 dollars, that's pretty sweet at the end of the year.

One of the things that I started adding up was 'How much did it cost to deploy the old way versus the new way?'

I think the difference in cost was when you get done with the wiring and all of the equipment and all of the different people to set up the old system, it was coming in at somewhere in the neighborhood of about 35,000 dollars to set up a branch, and the new way, which was half the wiring, half the equipment—not to mention the fact that it actually integrates into what we already have—it came out to about 22,000 dollars to install a new branch of the same size.

One of the things that we realized with Cisco equipment was the fact that we didn't have to go out and find somebody special to work on it; there's a number of people available that could work on it for us. You can make a phone call to just about anyone and they've got a Cisco technician available, so that helped us out quite a bit.

I mean, at one point we considered hiring another person to help me keep up, and because we no longer have this oddball equipment out there, our network's now manageable to myself and some part-time help here and there. "