Based in Culver City, Calif., E&S Ring Management Corp. owns more than 20 upscale apartment properties in Southern and Northern California; its mission is to enable residents to “live well.” As such, E&S Ring also manages 800 boat slips in Marina del Rey. A tech-savvy company, E&S Ring captures all of its residents’ payments electronically and offers interactive Web tools. In addition to the Internet, E&S Ring relies heavily on phone and fax communications.

The Challenge. E&S Ring found itself facing higher voice and Internet costs even as data service suffered from poor quality. The company had been using one service provider for data and several others for voice, and the approach had grown inefficient. We were layering on costly incremental connections and services to the voice network,” said Kevin Hott, director of information systems and technology at E&S Ring. In addition, individual apartment sites were making unauthorized telecommunication commitments. So along with cutting costs, we wanted to centralize voice and data control.”

Once E&S Ring made that decision, the company approached its  incumbent data service provider, but that operator seemed to have little interest in helping E&S Ring. We wanted a customer service team that could produce results when we asked them,” Hott said. By going to our provider directly, we realized that we were a little fish in a big sea and, therefore, not getting the results that we wanted.” At this point, Hott turned to value-added reseller and telecom agent CDW.

The Solution. E&S Ring asked CDW to start with an assessment of its voice and data needs. From there, the management firm wanted CDW’s ideas for an optimal solution that would consolidate E&S Rings WAN and voice, eliminate complexity, add redundancy and greatly reduce monthly telecom costs.

CDW’s proposal was to move E&S Ring to VoIP over an MPLS WAN. This would accomplish three overarching goals:

Hott said the solution made sense. We were on a straight MPLS solution with our previous data vendor, so adding the voice layer on top of it offered a great deal of efficiency.”

From there, CDW showed E&S Ring its carrier matrix with service and pricing options for six top operators. After analyzing each provider with a list of pros and cons, CDW recommended E&S Ring use XO Communications. E&S Ring agreed and work began. The first phase included a one-to-one replacement of MPLS circuits in many of the apartment buildings managed by E&S Ring. XO Communications provided all the equipment, dropping the needed circuits at the building locations. The second and final phase addressed the voice side of the project.

The Result. E&S Ring has seen a dramatic drop in its communications expenses, as well as better network management and redundancy. For starters, the company now saves about $8,500 per month or $306,000 over the life of the contract on its WAN and voice bills. Telecommunications costs were the main reason we moved to converged voice and data,” Hott said. “Theres no question, the efficiencies gained by merging voice and data under one umbrella allow us to save a lot of money.”

But E&S Ring hopes to save even more money. Our overall goal for cost savings resulting from the converged network is $10,500 per month,” said Hott. To recoup the additional $2,000, we plan to move our emergency communication to another provider or readjust our business plan.”

Meanwhile, E&S Ring also is taking advantage of a scalable, more easily managed network and redundant voice platform, as migrating from aging legacy voice lines to MPLS converged voice and data enhanced the performance of E&S Ring’s existing WAN.