Conferencing provides disaster link: in-house solution provides cost savings over outsourcing alternative - Special Focus: Conferencing - NSTAR

Communications News, Oct, 2003

When severe winter storms move through New England, potentially causing a significant power interruption, energy provider NSTAR is fully prepared and equipped to respond to emergency requests. In fact, part of its emergency restoration plan includes having more than several hundred employees in the field. How do these remote workers, in addition to those onsite, stay updated throughout the emergency response time? Voice conferencing.

The result of a merger between Boston Edison and Commonwealth Energy System, NSTAR was established in 1999. At the time of the merger, the telecommunications group acquired two different ways to conference: managing an in-house system and outsourcing to a provider, which proved duplicative and counter-productive for NSTAR.

The company emphasizes its disaster response time to customers all over the Boston area, which means maintaining a balanced and well-understood line of communication among its field workers and employees. To determine the best approach, NSTAR asked telecommunications analyst Edward Cook to evaluate ease-of-use features and financial pros and cons.

In its search for a voice conferencing system, NSTAR acknowledged that a natural disaster could occur at any point in a given day. Therefore, it ruled out an operator-based system, which may cause a delay in implementing its response strategy. Should a storm make its way through town after normal business hours, operators are most likely unavailable to schedule a call.

The next step was to determine and consider the value of outsourcing its conferencing service vs. managing an in house solution. The benefits related to an outsourced service included no capital expenditure and no need for additional resources to manage the technology. Conversely, owning an in-house system provides such advantages as depreciation of purchased assets and, with enough subscribers, it is more cost-effective. Organizations like NSTAR can also experience an increased level of security since there is no third party listening to calls and/or participating in the call scheduling.

NSTAR determined that is was more cost-effective to purchase the equipment up front. It wanted a reliable solution with solid historical uptime data, reliability and ease of management. The energy provider also needed an affordable solution that fulfilled its criteria of on-demand availability--24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

NSTAR evaluated conferencing solutions from two vendors, who provided in-depth technology demonstrations, and then reviewed the benefits and cost-saving models respective to in-house conferencing solutions. Having owned a Voyant conferencing system for the last 15 years, the organization decided to upgrade to ReadiVoice, Voyant's reservation-less conferencing solution.

"The conferencing system meets the demand for high capacity that we may need at a moment's notice," says Cook. "The next-generation conferencing technology enables end-users to initiate conference calls, without the need to make reservations or contact operators. Holding a conference is as simple as dialing an access number and an account code."

To ensure installation success and avoid ambiguity, Voyant provided NSTAR with a pre-install checklist. NSTAR prepared the telephony side by ordering the phone circuits and the T-1. As part of the standard process, the equipment was assembled and primed at Voyant's Facility prior to the installation to decrease deployment time and maintenance needs during the lifespan of the system.

"We quickly set up subscribers with individual accounts and then passed along instructions on how to use the call flows," says Cook. "The system was immediately interoperable with the other components to our network and it was done mostly by our own internal team with the consultation of Voyant."

NSTAR's telecommunications team evaluated pricing from various outsourced providers. The group then compared the cost to the monthly depreciation amount. Each time, NSTAR concluded that it is saving money with an in-house system. Additionally, the more use the system experiences, the greater the savings. With approximately 120 employees subscribed to the conferencing system, NSTAR has successfully maintained its communication during disaster-recovery scenarios.

ReadiVoice conferencing

ReadiVoice is a reservation-less, on-demand conferencing system that enables end-users to initiate conference calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without the need to make reservations or contact operators. ReadiVoice uses Voyant's next-generation InnoVox Media Server, which was designed to meet the rigorous demands of customers with regard to high capacity, fault tolerance, hardware redundancy and maintainability. Key features of InnoVox include: hot-swappable cards, power supplies and fans; a robust design with redundant and fault-tolerant features; and a high-density, rack-mountable chassis with a small footprint.

For more information from Voyant: www.rsleads.com/310cn-260