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FEATURE

The Greenfield ROI

July 7, 2008

By Howard Baldwin

WesBanco and Florida Health Care Plans were able to derive significant benefits from their unified communications deployments in large part because both companies were able to replace disparate PBX systems with consolidated, state-of-the-art technology. But what happens when you are starting from scratch at a non-profit organization?

To keep their costs down, three Minneapolis-based non-profit organizations-the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center, the Cristo Rey School, and Urban Ventures-banded together for a shared unified communications network.

According to Dale Klein, the CEO of Parallel Technologies, the St. Louis Park, Minn.-based Cisco Partner that deployed the project, "The savings stemmed not only from hard costs associated with initial equipment purchases but also from ongoing network management costs. The network in place is more robust than any of the organizations could have secured as independent organizations, which translates into better performance in the short term and increased savings down the road."

Parallel COO Ben Friswold adds, "By aggregating their buying power, they could get better capacity. As each group grows, they have more scalability, so they'll realize savings as time goes on."

Howard Baldwin is a senior writer in Sunnyvale, CA.