Tax advisers seek comms bonus

Accountancy firm Haysmacintrye has embarked on a unified communications deployment in a bid to boost customer service

Haysmacintyre looks to create more flexible communications

Chartered accountancy and tax advisory firm Haysmacintyre recently upgraded its analogue telephone network to a unified communications (UC) system based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

The UC upgrade will eventually deliver IP telephony, instant messaging- (IM-) based presence and web conferencing to around 200 staff at Haysmacintyre's London office. The project started in September 2008 and implementation is still underway.

"The idea is to move away from using separate numbers for mobile and desktop phones, and to use presence and availability features to track people down in order to offer a better service to our clients," says Haysmacintyre's chief information officer, Simon Bulleyment.

The company is keen to introduce a "work anywhere, anytime" approach that uses a combination of IP handsets with softphones running on desktop PCs, laptops and handheld devices, as well as a web client offering a voice portal for those working from home.

Unlike many companies installing UC for the first time, Haysmacintyre did not have to invest in additional hardware or software in the network or on the desktop to support it.

"We installed a Siemens time division multiplexed (TDM) private branch exchange (PBX) five years ago because we felt that, at the time, SIP was not mature enough," says Bulleyment.

"But we did have the vision that we would end up going to voice over IP (VoIP) at some point in the future, so we put in a suitable Cisco network with all the technology to support SIP going forward. We also migrated our PCs to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 last year, so we had a good, solid desktop platform to support UC as well."

One upgrade the company has made was to increase the capacity of its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to support telephony servers, power over Ethernet (PoE) phones and the foundation of a redundant, clustered telephony system based on dual nodes, one of which will eventually be outsourced as a cloud computing service.

Given Haysmacintyre's existing relationship with Siemens, which had installed the TDM PBX just five years before, it made sense for Bulleyment to continue his relationship with the supplier.

He refused to divulge the value of the contract, but the UC equipment is being leased over a five-year period, with a small additional amount paid on an annual basis for ongoing support from Siemens.

For the moment, return on investment (ROI) is more likely to come from providing better services to Haysmacintyre clients. But Bulleyment is confident that phase three of the UC project, which aims to replace ISDN trunk lines with IP telephony and mobile phone numbers with a call extension and forwarding service, and provide web conferencing facilities, will drive the company's communications costs down in the long run.

Like all IT chiefs, Bulleyment has to convince a management board that any big project is worth the investment, and the UC upgrade was no exception.

"It is part of my role to justify any increased spend on an annual basis, but it was not difficult in this case," he says. "The company's IT budget is still healthy – like most firms we are looking at costs and making sure that things are as efficient as possible, but we are not slashing out budget."

With the communications upgrade underway, Bulleyment's next project involves virtualising the growing number of physical file servers hosting Haysmacintyre's data, with storage efficiency another target.

"It is not so much storage capacity as how to manage it more effectively, and we are looking at document management tools to help store client records," he says.