Newmark Knight Frank
When real estate giant Newmark Knight Frank needed to replace a faltering PBX phone system,
Logicalis answered the call with IP Telephony.New York-based Newmark Knight Frank and London-based partner Knight Frank Newmark operate over 165 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents. Last year alone, its realtors completed transactions valued at over $37.3 billion.
When their legacy PBX phone system began faltering at its New York headquarters, replacing it with a more dependable system became a top priority for Thaddeus Elms in the Newmark Knight Frank IT department.
Cost savings, ease of management, and the promise of unified communications productivity features made IP Telephony the logical choice for the new voice infrastructure. But there were still a lot of choices within IP Telephony that had to be answered.
The Cisco Option
Coming from a background in data networks, Elms says he had to contend with different technical considerations, as well as the different jargon associated with voice networks.
Elms had narrowed the field of telephony vendors down to two, including Cisco. In the confusion of unfamiliar acronyms, competing claims and swinging expectations, Elms found one source of clarity he could always count on for an objective evaluation. That source was Logicalis technology consultant, Jim Dossias.
“Jim really pulled everything together for us,” Elms says. “He knew exactly what we needed to accomplish our objectives... and how to get it.”
A self-study course in voice technology and a detailed look at some of the players, provided Elms the information he needed to be comfortable choosing a Cisco platform. “In my analysis, Cisco brought more of the functionality and the integration we were looking for. Cisco had a fully mature IP platform we could build on.”
Unified Communications Manager
Newmark Knight Frank became one of the first large-scale organizations to implement Cisco Unified Communication Manager – the software-based heart of Cisco’s IP telephony solution. The software extends enterprise telephony features and functions to devices such as IP phones, voice-over-IP (VoIP) and multimedia applications. Because the technology was so new, the initial roll-out was not without some challenges. Once they were resolved, Elms and his team have been able to outfit the New York headquarters and three branch offices with IP phones. So far, more than half of the 800 total phones have been installed.
Elms says the ease of adding the incremental service is a huge benefit of the new IP system.
“All we need to do now is configure the phone locally, ship it out in a box and tell someone to plug it in,” Elms says. “Putting in a new phone with the old system used to mean having a contract with some third party to send someone out at $200 an hour,” he adds. “With the new system, all the support occurs here at headquarters.”
Elms says the emphasis was on getting a reliable IP phone system up and running, so they didn’t include a lot of the new features during the initial implementation. Now that his end users are comfortable and confident with their soft phones, they are beginning to introduce the features associated with unified communications, like unified messaging, presence and mobility.
“It took a while for the users to realize that their phone is now much more than a phone,” Elms says. “Some users are much more adaptive than others.”
One of the new features that Newmark’s mobile sales force has taken to readily is the ability to connect their notebook computers back to headquarters, and have access to their office phone system. Cisco IP Communicator allows their four-digit extension to ring on their notebooks wherever they are. They are able to make, receive and transfer calls, as well as set up conferences calls, as easily as if they were sitting at their desks.
A key characteristic that differentiates unified communications from legacy PBX systems is that it is an engineered solution which is able to grow and evolve with the needs of the organization. Voice specialist Marc Hering and network engineer Robert Ross have since joined Elm’s staff, and are working on expanding and enhancing the platform to give Newmark Knight Frank a communications advantage in their competitive market.
Elms says he still turns to Logicalis for specific equipment. “When I order something, to this day,” Elms says, “Logicalis can foresee exactly what we need to make things work.”
