How one of America’s Largest Conglomerates Improved its Legacy Support and Service Management While Migrating to Teams
Background
Koch Industries is committed to creating value and improving life through a wide variety of products. These products include plant nutrients, water filtration devices, building materials, environmentally responsible asphalt, animal products, sanitary towel dispensers for public bathrooms, advanced circuitry, and fuel. Koch and its subsidiaries operate under the philosophy that their business is about more than money, compelling them to provide long-term solutions for their customers' needs.
The solution
Cost effective maintenance for Cisco and Avaya systems at over 100 sites
Internal resources freed up to focus on high priority projects, including migration to Microsoft Teams
Carrier services that handle all communications and troubleshooting with dozens of carriers globally
Service Management transparency across different systems via eBonding
The challenge
Internal IT resources wrapped up in telecom systems
Difficulties communicating with carriers and managing carrier relationships
No international support
No ITSM integration
The story
Ever pressing towards innovation and creativity, Koch Industries began migrating more than 70,000 users from Avaya and Cisco Systems to Microsoft Teams. For an organization as large as Koch, this isn’t the sort of migration that happens overnight. Koch needed to keep its legacy systems operating with as little downtime as possible in the interim.
Two major problems plagued Koch during this time. The first came from having its IT staff wrapped up in maintaining telecom devices, slowing down the migration to Teams even more. The second was frustration that came from communicating with several different carriers and manufacturers. The time Koch’s engineers wasted sitting on the phone with their carriers was far too high.
Koch had its own successful internal support model, along with a partner that supported its systems well. Unfortunately, this partner only supported Koch’s US locations. Continuant, however, provided an alternative. With Continuant Managed Services, Koch found that it could get cost-effective maintenance and support both nationally and internationally.
Koch's former partner also didn’t integrate with Koch’s IT Service Management (ITSM), meaning Koch relied on manual intervention for incident creation and tracking. To save time and money, Koch selected eBonding from Continuant. With eBonding, Continuant could automatically exchange tickets between Koch’s systems and keep its users updated on any changes.
Continuant now supports 10 Avaya sites and more than 100 Cisco sites for Koch, including international locations in Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the UAE, and the UK. With Continuant handling 200 service requests per month, Koch’s IT staff can focus on their Teams migration.
Continuant also provides carrier services for Koch. Through this service, Continuant handles relationships with all Koch's carriers, sitting on the phone with them to resolve problems and saving Koch even more time.
Koch has already onboarded 30,000 users to its Teams solution and continues to rely on Continuant as it closes the gap. Being a conglomerate, different entities within Koch are on different migration schedules, and will likely receive maintenance and support from Continuant for quite some time. Until those sites move to Teams, they’ll be able to press on knowing their systems are protected by Continuant’s cost-effective support.
Communication and collaboration is at the core of your organization. With Continuant’s UC and AV solutions, you’re one step closer to better business outcomes. Discover how your technology stacks up with a 30-minute assessment today.
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