My last two blogs introduced the growing market for Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) solutions. Organizations are increasingly adopting UC&C solutions to streamline their communications and lower their costs while dramatically improving productivity of their globally dispersed teams. Gazprom Marketing and Trading (GM&T) successfully deployed UCC through Dell. GM&T took advantage of Dell’s expertise, their flexible approach on deploying UCC with a company’s existing IT infrastructure, and Dell’s ability to deploy UCC infrastructures all the way from the device to the datacenter. The whole UCC approach enabled their employees to communicate and collaborate anytime, anywhere, with any device.
GM&T, headquartered in London, is an energy-trading business and part of OAO Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of natural gas. In just 10 years, GM&T had expanded from just a single office to a global operation with offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. At the time Dell engaged them, GM&T expected to grow their employee base up to 50%. They felt that they had gone as far as they could with the technology that was in place, needing a more scalable datacenter. They also planned to upgrade their existing Microsoft Unified Communications software.
GM&T chose to work with Dell on UCC to deploy a highly scalable cluster of virtualized servers and then to migrate to Lync Server 2010. Ian Burgess, Head of Global Technical Infrastructure for GM&T had worked with Dell from a previous role and had been pleased with the results.
GM&T decided to standardize on Dell PowerEdge R610 and R910 servers. This gave them economic usage of space so they could build out as needed. It also gave them cost savings as their business grew. GM&T commented that they found excellent support through Dell’s consulting expertise. Burgess mentioned that “the great thing about the Dell Consulting team was that it took ownership of the migration, reducing risk and speeding up the whole deployment process.”
After the UCC deployment, the personnel at GM&T found they were able to complete tasks that required collaboration much faster with the new communication solution. Teams in different offices now share applications during web conferences to review and amend documents in real time. They also launch IM conversations, phone calls or video conferences at any time 24/7. According to Burgess “personnel love the intuitiveness of the software and the stability of the service thanks to the Dell solution in place.”
