Privately held Forbes has been a New York institution since its inception more than 100 years ago, when it launched its namesake business magazine. Today, it’s a worldwide operation, with employees spread among offices and bureaus around the globe creating content for the flagship publication as well as 10 foreign editions, a handful of other titles and several other online sites.

“The flexibility of the platform and how we can use it to work more closely with our customers and our internal staff is the biggest win on this,” says Evon. In the same way that the conference call was innovative in its day, the ability for people in Forbes bureaus to use video and see one another will increasingly play a pivotal role in day-to-day operations.

Other capabilities also appeal to sales and business users, he notes. More and more, there are employees who telework, who are on the road or who need anytime, anywhere access to technology, he says.

“Our internal customers, the employees at Forbes, look at the phone system like a utility,” Evon says. “Like the lights, the phone system has to work, and the ability to do video conferencing is a significant value add. We can be much more productive and work and collaborate as if sitting directly across from each other.”

UC tools such as simultaneous ringing on multiple lines and bringing up softphones on a notebook computer make the company’s staff much more available, he says.

At the onset of the project, Evon and Rambus acknowledged that they had reason to be a bit on edge. For starters, they had to assuage senior management.

“Our general manager was frankly skeptical about the move to VoIP,” says Rambus. “He’d heard earlier horror stories about installations and the garbled quality of the calls.”

What’s more, this was no simple VoIP deployment. It required setting a strategy for the services at Forbes’ storied headquarters as well as a second location, two blocks north at 90 Fifth Ave. There were two go-live dates on back-to-back weekends, first for the entire building at 60 Fifth Ave., and then a week later for the office up the street.

“All the work that we did, from planning and execution, paid off,” Evon says.

That planning work involved a team of pre-installation engineers doing a sweeping analysis of every bit of network technology deployed within Forbes as well as a node-by-node review of the private branch exchange (PBX) systems.

“One of the biggest challenges in New York is that many buildings are very old,” says Patrick Priest, a project manager for CDW Advanced Technology Services. There are typically a lot of cabling needs and issues related to power and cooling whenever anyone in the city wants to revamp a network, so the team assessed the Forbes buildings and both legacy networks to gauge their VoIP readiness. With those details in hand, the team worked with the Forbes IT staff to define the new VoIP and UC infrastructure (see “From Stem to Stern,” below).

Replacing the legacy networks required a ground-up retooling of the network infrastructure at 90 Fifth Ave., from the core of the network to the user core, a complete hardware upgrade and a revamp of all IP connections. The headquarters building had been upgraded two years earlier with Cisco gear that could handle VoIP, so it required only quality-of-service tuning to prioritize voice and data traffic, says Ziyad Roumaya, a CDW network engineer. “We did do a lot of reconfigurations and adjustments.”

The installation strategy called for running the new and old networks in tandem to shake out any glitches, avoid downtime and ease users’ adoption of the new phones (see “Put ’em at Ease,” below). And although the wiring closets were small, “we were able to rack and stack new hardware in the existing closets so that there wasn’t any downtime,” Roumaya says.

Right from the start, Forbes can calculate some direct cost savings—from turning off several voice circuits, shuttering PBXs and converging voice, data and video pipelines.

“But the flexibility that it allows us to give our customers—the employees—is huge; that’s truly the long-term benefit for Forbes,” Evon says.

There’s also the savings on day-to-day systems maintenance. From the early planning stages, the New York media company weighed how it could most efficiently and cost effectively manage a unified communications platform. Ultimately, it chose to outsource support, starting on day two.

Hiring additional staff to manage the environment did not seem like a viable option, Evon says. After all, they would have difficulty keeping their skills honed because they would not need to use them day in and day out.

By outsourcing management services, he points out that Forbes gains the bench strength and the facilities necessary to properly test new applications, manage patches, maintain patch documentation and monitor telephony activity.

“With any PBX environment, there are a lot of moving parts, and there’s a lot of skill needed to manage the platform,” he says. “We would rather focus our staff resources on new technology efforts to drive revenue and efficiencies.”

The overhaul also has other intangible benefits, adds Rambus.

“It had the additional impact in this rough economic environment of showing people that we were investing in them and the physical infrastructure.” That’s not only a win for the company’s leadership, but it also has a “psychological impact” on the employees, improving morale, he says.

“And, oh yes, we saved money: The cost per unit went down.”

About two weeks before Forbes went live with a new Voice over Internet Protocol phone system, employees came to work to find these new IP phones on their desks right next to their old phones.

That really smoothed out the implementation, says Scott Evon, director of technology operations. It allowed each employee to continue to use the existing phone but also to call anyone inside the company on the new phone and to play with the features.

“That way, when we went live on the first day of service, none of it was new,” Evon says. “That was absolutely one of the items as a best practice that paid off.”