In 1997, TT Electronics implemented a Toshiba phone system. By 2008, the phone system had run out of space for adding new users. The company started taking phones away from existing employees just to make sure the new employees had a phone to use. Toshiba advised the support on this particular PBX had lapsed and the model was outdated. In order to continue with Toshiba, TT Electronics would have to purchase a completely new version of the hardware. This was a lateral move and extremely expensive. This untenable situation led TT Electronics to search for a completely new phone system.

“In the beginning phases of our research we determined that solutions from Nortel, Avaya and Cisco, were not in the company’s best interest. Considering the current situation with Toshiba we decided to search for a flexible, lower-cost, effective and non-proprietary solution. Management started to focus on an open-source solution as it was believed that it would deliver the best return on investment,” said David Koch, manager information systems at TT Electronics.

“We discovered an open-source solution called Asterisk and began our in-house evaluation,” continued Koch. “Our IT staff had some Linux background, but very little telephony experience. We were able to determine that Asterisk was a possibility, but we didn’t have the time or expertise to make it work in a production environment; let alone the entire corporation. In order for this to be successful, we needed to find an experienced solutions provider to help us transition off of the Toshiba PBX to a modern phone system.” A quick Web search lead Koch to Taridium.

The Solution:

At the time, TT Electronics was not even looking for a graphical management interface. The Taridium interface immediately changed the company’s perception though. They could now manage their PBX themselves and hand daily maintenance tasks off to an administrator. Due diligence motivated in depth comparisons with an array of open-source VoIP companies such as Fonality, Switchvox, Trixbox and Digium.

After an exhaustive search, which took six months, TT Electronics finally chose Taridium as their new standard for a corporate phone solution. The key drivers for the choice were a clean and simple end-user interface, a powerful administrative interface, ease of use, professional support, the ability to add phones and users in-house, no hard limits on the number of users and expandability, an excellent price-to-performance ratio, and fast turnaround of remote access and troubleshooting.

Results:

“It was a long process but we needed to find the right solution for our enterprise, and that was Tardium. Taridium offered the best blend of flexibility, price to performance, excellent references and expertise,” explained Koch. “The management approved the first deployment in our Ohio office, and we moved forward with the installation. Taridium did a complete evaluation and helped us get our infrastructure in line. They were patient and stood by us while we dealt with internal network issues. Once those issues were resolved, Taridium remotely installed and configured our entire Perry office (initially 150 users) in a matter of days. To say the least, we were surprised at the level of expertise and speed at which our phone system was put into production. To add on, Taridium is incredibly responsive with customer support and we are extremely impressed. On our old system, we had to deal with special on-site service calls even for minor changes. Just the turn around time for remote management of this system is worth it.”