West Coast Law Firm Boosts IT Productivity with 'PhoneTop' IP Phone Application from AAC

October 11, 2005

By Cindy McDowell, News@Cisco

Fenwick & West, a law firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area with a staff of 550, provides legal services to high technology and life sciences clients of national and international prominence. The firm is a 100-percent Cisco shop, and had added the Cisco IP Communications solution onto its existing mission-critical data network. But network engineer Oliver Rebollido wanted to leverage the company's powerful Cisco IP phones for productivity enhancing applications.

"I was planning for how to handle shutting down our data systems during a computer virus attack; particularly, how to communicate this across the company," says Rebollido. "Since viruses are transmitted over e-mail, sending out a companywide message using that medium was ill-advised. I began to research how we could broadcast information via the displays on our Cisco IP phones."

A quick search on the Cisco Technology Developer Program's web site led Rebollido to AAC Inc., a Virginia-based member of the Cisco Technology Developer Program.

Over the past several years, AAC has developed a way to differentiate itself in competitive bidding situations.

"We're small compared to some of our competitors," says Doug Bowlds, vice president of engineering for AAC. "While we were bidding on an IP project for a local school district in 2002, we came up with an idea that would make our bid stand out. We showed the school how we could provide an application that would enable them to use their phones for attendance and other administrative functions. They were so excited that we realized we were really onto something."

AAC developed a line of applications that empower Cisco IP phone users to get the most out of their investments. The AAC PhoneTop applications provide special solutions for K-12 education, and also provide emergency alerts, an application suite for general office solutions, surveys, and employee testing.

"PhoneTop allows users to go beyond dial tone," says Bowlds. "With over five million Cisco IP phones currently in use, we're starting to sell these applications directly to Cisco customers. IT managers love these applications because they really take advantage of a company's investment."

Such is the case for Oliver Rebollido at Fenwick & West. PhoneTop enables Rebollido to send quick 'instant messages' to Cisco IP phone displays, defining the messages' urgency and their recipients.

"With PhoneTop, we can send out messages based on an IP address. If I just need to alert employees on the second floor about a potential maintenance issue, for example, I can do that," says Rebollido. "While most people check their e-mail frequently, they seem to look at their Cisco IP phone displays even more frequently to see if they have missed calls or voicemails. It's a great way to get urgent or emergency information out there, to the people who need to see it. And we don't have to broadcast it throughout the entire company unless the situation warrants it."

Bowlds says that school districts are big users of AAC PhoneTop products, particularly because of the applications' ability to use Cisco IP phone soft keys to respond to a message. For instance, if a school needs to "lock down" classrooms due to a dangerous situation, the lockdown order can be sent to each phone display rather than broadcast throughout the school. And teachers can respond saying all students are accounted for, or alert the office that a student is missing.

By providing an easy way to use Cisco IP phones as instant message devices, AAC's PhoneTop applications can empower millions of users to tap into the full potential of Cisco IP Communications.

Cindy McDowell is a freelance journalist located in Santa Cruz, CA.