AGC Networks helps Polaris cut 70% of their collaboration costs
Enhanced profit ability with ROI in less than 6 months
Business Challenge
Polaris software is a leading global provider of banking and insurance software. Founded in 1993, it
has grown significantly, with a CAGR of over 70%, to become the chosen outsourcing partner for
10 of the top 15 global banks and 6 of the 10 top global insurance companies. The organization has
7000 employees operating out of 23 international offices, 4 near shore development centers and 7
Business Solution Centers and various customer locations
across the globe. With its vision to unleash the collective
knowledge potential to help customers win in their
marketplace, Polaris required an effective means of global
collaboration among their distributed offices and expert
teams.
It started using external services about 3 years back
with dramatic effectiveness, however very soon, the
company was spending very significantly on such
collaboration. The usage of third-party conference bridges
exceeded 20,000 minutes costing up to Rs.20 lakhs per month, besides heavy spend on interoffice
national and international calls. This load was steadily growing further as the company became
more and more IP and collaboration centric and Polaris felt an urgent need to create a cost
effective and scalable collaboration infrastructure.
AGC Networks's Engagement With Polaris
Polaris engaged with leading collaboration technology providers in search of a solution to reduce
their communication costs. AGC Networks leveraged its extensive experience with global IT
players and tapped its dedicated Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Industry
Vertical practice to study and assess Polaris' business needs. Based on the ROI assessment, AGC
recommended Polaris to implement a scalable inhouse
conference bridge. The solution would exploit
the recently implemented MPLS based global data
network of Polaris for all interoffice calls and
conferences using VOIP technology and reduce the
usage of the third-party bridges while offering a
consistent collaboration experience to users across
the organization, across the globe.
The solution
provided Polaris with Avaya Meeting Exchange in India over its IP network and allowed users to dial
in from across the globe over IP, thus reducing the conferencing charges as well as international
calling expenses. The significance of the solution lay in AGC's expertise in successfully deploying
the solution to offer the best Quality of Service (QoS) to the users and at the same time assisting
Polaris in successfully shifting users to the in-house bridge thus reducing their communication
expenses significantly.
Selecting The Target Collaboration Platform
Since the employees at Polaris had been using a third party conferencing bridge for a significant
period of time, the new in-house bridge would see adoption and higher usage only if it offered
improved quality of experience at a good ROI. Polaris identified that it would go ahead with a
solution that, at a broad level, offered
- Homogeneity of employee collaboration experience
- Ease of management of infrastructure
- Ease of cost monitoring through reports and analytics
- Good technology capability and solution architecture robustness
- Total cost of ownership & ROI
Choosing from the best available in-house conferencing bridge options, Polaris selected Avaya's
Meeting Exchange to be implemented by AGC Networks. The decision was strongly
influenced by AGC's business as well as technology expertise, its clear understanding of Polaris'
business and ROI needs and its ability to showcase the solution in the context of Polaris. These
factors gave Polaris the confidence to engage with AGC.
AGC Networks's Solution
AGC Networks provided Polaris with a robust optimal design for reducing the conferencing
expenditure of Polaris at optimized investment.
The solution gave Polaris an Avaya PBX connecting to the existing infrastructure at Polaris via PRI
trunks from the existing router that in turn connected to the Conferencing server via SIP trunks.
AGC worked tirelessly to deliver its commitment of the best solution for Polaris. The number of
ports was right sized to the need of Polaris. Avaya Bridgetalk, a bridge management console
provided Polaris with a variety of monitoring and analytical reports on conferencing bridge use.
Apart from the bridge, AGC also provided IP
Softphones for Polaris employees to connect to
conferences from their roaming notebooks in
remote locations over an Internet connection.
Other features that the bridge provided are:
- Conference scheduling and management
- Additional privileges to a conference moderator like dial-out, participant hang-up, adjusting volume of conference, roll calls, lecture mode, etc
- Privilege to participants / administrators to also schedule individual conferences through a web based console
- Internal recording facility for playing back conferences at a later point of time
- Better managed participant and moderator codes for security purposes
Polaris and AGC Networks Win-Win Engagement
Polaris' assessment and choice of Avaya Meeting Exchange was the first step of the Avaya
GlobalConnect Polaris winning engagement. The next challenge was to ensure successful
implementation of the collaboration platform at Polaris and to shift the users from the third party
bridge from the expensive third party bridge to cost effective and better quality in-house bridge.
Polaris' knowledge of its employees concerns with collaboration platforms and Avaya
GlobalConnect's knowledge of the technology came together to take Polaris to the desired business
benefits.
The technology teams from AGC Networks and Polaris came together to eliminate various
possible quality of service (QoS) issues. The teams worked together on
- Topology improvement
- TDM - IP conversion, compression issues management
- Bandwidth requirements and allocation
- Codec compatibility issues resolution
- Legal compliance issues management
- Enhancing organizational coverage of the solution
While the above steps ensured technology readiness to offer the best user experience irrespective
of location, Polaris undertook change management internally to bring people on to the in-house
bridge. All the internal conferences, accounting to 70% of total conference calls were successfully
shifted to Avaya Meeting Exchange. Mr.Balakrishnan, Partner & CIO, Polaris believes in the
capabilities of AGC
"AGC Networks has delivered a working solution and also has demonstrated their responsiveness in
resolving problems in a business critical manner - thus proving to be a dependable partner in evolving
effective business solutions for Polaris. We see more potential for growth in our engagement, in terms of
scope of solutions as well as usage volume."
Business Benefits
Polaris successfully implemented the in-house conference bridge to achieve the desired business
benefits.
- Reduced its expenditure on communication, saving Rs.14 lakh per month, by shifting all
internal conferences (70% of total third-party conference bridge use) to Avaya Meeting
Exchange
- Enhanced the collaboration experience of its
employees and made it homogeneous across
the organization
- Implemented a solution that is easily scalable
at very low incremental cost thus ensuring a
longer useful life for the investment
- Through communication expense reduction,
provided payback on investment in less than 6 months
- Achieved better monitoring of collaboration platform usage and effectiveness
Mr.Balakrishnan can already see the impact of Avaya Meeting Exchange on Polaris' business
"Polaris business calls for globally dispersed experts and accounts managers collaborating to provide the
best solutions to their global customers based on the Intellect product suite. Avaya Meeting Exchange has
created a cost effective audio conference platform for the globally dispersed teams of Polaris working on
common projects. This facility works on a self help mode without the need for call setup assistance or bill and
payments handling with external service providers. Since the internal conferences work on IP, controlling
durations / access points or managing costs have ceased to be of any concern. This facility is hence seen as a
major business enabler for Polaris."
The engagement of Polaris and AGC Networks continues to reduce communication costs
further to help Polaris focus on providing best services to its customers at enhanced profit margins.
About AGC Networks Ltd.
AGC Networks is India’s leading provider of intelligent communications solutions, systems
and services focused on meeting the needs of organizations large to small. The company offers a
comprehensive suite of Solutions for Contact centre, Business Process Outsourcing and end-to-end
Converged communications. By designing, building and managing some of the world’s most
advanced communications solutions, Avaya is helping its customers achieve sustained advantage
through superior business results. AGC Networks is dedicated to helping businesses enhance
and extend the capabilities of their people and processes to reduce costs, increase productivity and
grow revenues. For more information, please visit www.AGCNetworks.com
How to Get Started?
To know more about or to see a live demonstration of “Avaya Meeting Exchange” and to discuss
the ROI specific to your organization, please get in touch with your AGC Networks Sales
representative. AGC Networks ensures you the best solution design and implementation
experience.
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