Cisco Wireless Helps Italian Yellow Pages Business Go Mobile

June 15, 2009

By Jason Deign

Italy's yellow and white pages directory services company SEAT Pagine Gialle S.p.A. has a new headquarters. As you might expect with from a leading Italian business, the recently opened corporate HQ is a masterpiece of modern design. But one of its best features is invisible.

Throughout the seven buildings that make up the new SEAT Turin campus, one of the largest corporate wireless technology deployments in Italy, based on a Cisco® Unified Wireless Network, is helping the business deliver a new level of freedom, operational efficiency and collaboration.

Staff can check e-mails and set calendar events during spare time in meetings. Employees from other offices can work online without having to worry about finding a network point. People can work in cafeterias or other areas away from their desks.

The network also supports video, which plays an increasingly large part in the work that SEAT carries out on behalf of its advertisers, and in 2009 the company will roll out a new customer relationship management platform which will be completely Web-based and interactive.

To provide access to these applications, a total of 100 Cisco Aironet 1250 Series 802.11n access points are placed strategically across the campus, and are managed by two redundant Wireless Services Modules.

The 802.11n access points are part of a network infrastructure that also includes Cisco 7900 Series Unified IP Phones, Catalyst® 3750 and 6500 Series switches, ACE Application Control Engine Modules for load balancing and Network Admission Control (NAC) appliances for security.

The latter is an integral part of SEAT's wireless network security strategy, providing comprehensive protection to safeguard the company's confidential data and communications. In addition, a NAC Guest Server allows external consultants to access the corporate network.

"We wanted coverage inside and outside the new campus, to enable work mobility," explains Fabio Cuneaz, manager for architecture projects and security technologies at SEAT Pagine Gialle.

"Now many people have laptops and we wanted for them to be able to work in meeting rooms and everywhere else around the campus."

In addition, he says, the company plans to introduce Cisco wireless voice over IP, which should be easy thanks to the roaming and quality-of-service capabilities of the Cisco technology; specifically a Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) program will enable voice roaming with dual-mode phones.

When looking for wireless technology to be used in the Turin headquarters, Cuneaz specifically wanted centralized management. "We have approximately 100 access points so it is not an option to go around setting each one up by hand," he says.

"This was the first thing we looked for; the second was roaming. I wanted to be able to get an IP address in one building and take it with me to the next one."

Another consideration for the company was integrating Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unified Presence Server with Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator.

"This was one of the biggest challenges," Cuneaz points out. "It was not clear who should take responsibility for it and the process started two years ago with Live Communications Server, the forerunner of OCS."

In the event, SEAT became one of the first companies in Italy to achieve full integration of the Cisco and Microsoft systems. The majority of SEAT's network infrastructure is from Cisco, including the core network, and most of the equipment at the Turin campus is brand new.

For Cuneaz, this underscored the importance of choosing market leaders. "It is important to look for best of breed," he says. "We wanted a homogeneous infrastructure so we could leverage the integrated features it could offer."

"When the project started we had to decide whether we would simply relocate what we already had or create a new infrastructure that would support us for 10 or 15 years, not just in terms of technology but right across all aspects of the building.

"We wanted the new site to last us until 2020 and be technologically advanced."

And the best bit is that this has been achieved along with an impressive return on investment. "The investment we have made is resulting in very high efficiency in terms of the costs of maintenance and management of the new infrastructure," says Cuneaz.

"It enables very fast and dynamic implementations and we are able to support traffic for the foreseeable future, especially as we are seeing a huge growth in video traffic."

The Cisco technology, deployed through Italian Gold Certified Partner Pres, is allowing SEAT to deploy new applications such as satellite TV over the corporate network, which uses a 5 Megabit-per-second channel to deliver financial and breaking news to 50 senior managers in the company.

Previously they would have had to have televisions in their offices but Cuneaz believed an IP-based system would be more elegant and efficient.

The network also supports a digital finance service made up of video and hypertext, along with an internal Web TV channel with videos-on-demand published every week.

"Our network is becoming increasingly complex," concludes Cuneaz. "But the great thing is that as far as the end user is concerned, this complexity is completely hidden."

Fabio Checchi, the Cisco systems engineer working on the project, adds: "We have been able to share our 'network as a platform' vision with SEAT's IT team and to work with them to make the vision a reality with specific products and systems. The results have been very exciting."

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.