Founded in 1964, Royal Gold is a retailer of agricultural products and machinery throughout Bangledesh. Headquartered in Dhaka, they have 4 offices across the world and 4,000 employees spread out between those offices and remote workers.
Replacing a Cisco Call Manager
Royal Gold was using a Cisco Call Manager platform to manage their entire communications network. This platform was beginning to fail and its outdated feature set would not be able to support integrating new technologies or devices moving forward. Royal Gold reached out to Excel Intelligent Solutions, a communication solutions distributor in Bangladesh, to see what they would suggest for their new platform. Excel suggested a new network made up entirely of Grandstream solutions, anchored by the UCM6510 IP PBX. Royal Gold also reached out to various other vendors in Bangladesh and was unable to find another option that met all of their requirements while also fitting into their budget.
Royal Gold had a few requirements for their new solution. It had to be able to integrate all different types of communication technologies, it had to allow for future expansion as the company grew and they wanted the entire solution to come from one manufacturer. Grandstream hit all these marks. Another factor in the decision was the size of the required investment. The total cost of solutions from vendors like Cisco and Avaya came out to be
much more than their entire IT budget for the fiscal year. This is where Grandstream offered another competitive advantage: for well below the cost of the Cisco Call Manager solution, Royal Gold could deploy a Grandstream solution that offered more functionality than Cisco at a much lower price. This not only allowed them to build a more complex, redundant, distributed network, but also to deploy more endpoints and more technologies, like video conferencing, on this new platform.
In order to prove the power of the Grandstream solution, a test-site was installed with a smaller version of the full deployment. This allowed Royal Gold to see how the network would be setup, test it, and get used to managing and using the proposed platform. After only a few days, Royal Gold notified Excel Intelligent Solutions that they chose to build their entire new communications network using Grandstream solutions.
Excel Intelligent Solutions built and installed a fully integrated Grandstream unified communication solution for Royal Gold that included state-of-the-art voice & video collaboration tools. The Grandstream solution offered exactly what the company was looking for: one that can integrate all different types of voice, video, data and mobility technologies, the ability to easily support future expansion and the ability to simply expand the solution’s capacity by adding additional IP PBXs in the future. Best yet, they could build this entire solution using products from one manufacturer – Grandstream.
The deployment was anchored by Grandstream’s award-winning UCM series of IP PBXs. Two UCM6510 IP PBXs were installed in their Dhaka headquarters, which primarily supported the company’s 14 offices in Bangladesh. UCM6102s were installed in remote offices around the world and peered back to the two central UCM6510s to create a distributed network. To ensure this network offered complete redundancy, Excel Intelligent Solutions installed an HA100 High Availability Controller to link the two UCM6510s. The HA100 ensures that if the primary UCM6510 goes down for any reason, all activity is switched to the secondary UCM6510.
In terms of endpoints, Excel Intelligent Solutions suggested Grandstream’s GXP2130 and GXP2170 High End IP phones, the GXP1625 Basic IP phone and the WP series of Wi-Fi IP phones. All of these devices were deployed throughout their offices. The High-End IP phones were deployed for workers who handles high call volume, the GXP1625 for basic users and the WP series for anyone who needs to be mobile around their office without missing calls. In order to support additional communication options aside from just voice, Excel Intelligent Solutions installed 13 of Grandstream’s GVC series of Video Conferencing Devices throughout Royal Gold’s offices. These devices replaced older yet more expensive Cisco models.
Now that Royal Gold had the modern video conferencing network they desired, they needed to choose a video conferencing platform. At the advice of Excel, the company chose Grandstream’s IPVideoTalk video, audio and web collaboration platform. With remote workers and offices across the world, IPVideoTalk offered one platform that could support room and web-based video conferencing, combine the two in the same meeting, and also allow them to hold webinars with clients or perspective clients. IPVideoTalk allowed them to build a collaboration platform that could be utilized by all employees, no matter where they worked, using physical devices, computers, tablets and mobile devices.
Quick and Easy Provisioning, Setup and Management
Two specific Grandstream offerings made Royal Gold’s massive new network quick and easy to install – so easy that most of the network was setup and installed in just one weekend. GAPS (Grandstream Auto Provisioning Service) allowed all of the Grandstream devices to be provisioned once deployed by simply pointing them all back to a GAPS server. In addition to GAPS, the Zero Config feature within the UCM series of IP PBXs allowed the devices to be auto discovered and then automatically configured in a few clicks of the mouse using the UCM’s web user interface.
The Result
Royal Gold now has the comprehensive, high-end communication solution they need to expand their business throughout the world. The Grandstream solution offers multi-site support through peering of the UCM series IP PBXs, scalability to support new users by adding additional devices, a redundant solution thanks to a distributed network, and high availability to ensure the network never goes down. Royal Gold’s new solution also drastically reduced their call costs and completely eliminated all the licensing and recurring fees that they were used to from Cisco – which had a major impact on their bottom line. Finally, thanks to the fact that the whole solution came from Grandstream and could be managed from the UCM series IP PBXs without any licensing fees or complicated upgrades, their IT team saw a major reduction in maintenance time and management costs.