Making sure you give the right people the right impression can make or break a deal. For recruitment firms conducting interviews in multiple cities, travel time, costs and scheduling can be a drain; especially when business is booming and you need to be in too many places at the one time. For executives that need to get that all important face-to-face meeting time with clients, wasting valuable hours waiting in transit lounges or stuck in traffic is a maddening obstruction that can impact the bottom line through lost productivity and an injured company reputation.

Taking up a unified communications solution is one way of easing the burden.

In late 2007, ASX-listed integrator, ComputerCorp, was enlisted to help relieve Springboard Recruitment's IT pain points and logistical issues. Springboard is an Australian recruitment consultancy firm that has been experiencing solid growth.

One of the firm's major issues was managing staff/client time. A strategic company goal of having executives involved in all key placements for national clients proved to be costly and overly time-consuming as they spent a great deal of time in transit instead of communicating directly with the people they needed to impress.

The company's existing IT infrastructure, involving a basic set-up of telephony and email, also left Springboard staff feeling unable to deliver the professional image they hoped for at all contact points. As a result, senior management spent a lot of time dealing with day-to-day IT issues instead of driving business growth.

"It was unstable in terms of the hardware and software," managing director, Scott Osborne, said. "It wasn't delivering a productive working environment. And that was heavily impeding my time and other staff members' time."

The Solution

To help Springboard achieve executive involvement in all key placements without bearing the high costs of extensive travel and ensuring a high-tech professional image, ComputerCorp put a UC solution into action. The technologies chosen as part of the deployment was based around Cisco Call Manager and included routers, switches and handsets, Microsoft Exchange (which was carried over from the former infrastructure), Polycom video conferencing and NEC plasma screens.

Selecting the UC technologies, however, was not all that had to be taken into consideration.

"Originally the discussion was around a collaborative communications environment," ComputerCorp's eastern region director, Tony Heywood, said. "But when we went and did an audit of the network we found they [Springboard] had less-than optimised nfrastructure."

The first port of call was to upgrade the infrastructure with new servers and update the recruiter's room construction across its Brisbane and Melbourne offices. Once this was in place, ComputerCorp could then implement the other UC components such as Cisco Call Manager. But as the Brisbane office was under construction at the time of implementation other factors also came into play.