Jon Shelby of Continuant discusses the Parexel
Teams migration with Metrigy's Diane Meyers.
This communication infrastructure consumed valuable IT resources. To overcome these challenges, Parexel decided to migrate to a Microsoft Teams Calling and Meeting Rooms solution. However, executing such a migration can be a daunting task. And this is where Continuant joins the story.
In the spring of 2022, Paraxel signed a contract with Continuant for Microsoft Teams Connect Meeting Rooms and Microsoft Teams Connect Teams. This marked the start of migrating 16,000 users and 111 Microsoft Teams Rooms in over 40 countries.
To ensure minimal business disruption, we opted for a Cloud Video Interop solution to deploy Teams Meeting Rooms in EMEA and upgraded Parexel sites with Microsoft Teams Rooms. This allowed us to maintain seamless connectivity while meeting the region's needs.
Continuant deployed Teams Phone with Direct Routing for Parexel's locations worldwide, ensuring full compliance with federal law on emergency services. With the new features in Teams such as call delegates, forwarding, and voicemail available in Outlook or Teams, employees could now read or listen to voicemail from different apps, resulting for a user-friendly communications experience.
Continuant supports Parexel's users all over the world, including countries such as Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
Parexel helps deliver lifesaving treatments to reach patients faster. As one of the world’s largest clinical research organizations (CROs), Parexel provides the full range of Phase I to IV clinical development services. With a global team of over 21,000 professionals working in collaboration with partners to deliver clinical trials swiftly, it was clear that their team members needed to have a voice each step of the way. Also, their need for a unified communication environment was crystal clear.
Parexel wanted a better way to communicate, one that would bring its workforce together and make the world feel smaller. Its communication system—used by 16K employees in 40 countries around the world—failed to keep pace with modern enterprise unified communications, which led to workforce frustration in addition to inefficient workflows.
Parexel needed a unified, cloud-based system that connected everyone, no matter where they worked. An inconsistent and unreliable platform created unnecessary complexity and a communication gap with customers, vendors, and co-workers. This problem was compounded by the fact that on-site desk phones could not support remote workers.
In addition, the company’s video conferencing application had poor connectivity and was not user-friendly. The telephony platform was confusing due to the use of disparate systems including analog devices and independent meeting applications.
Additionally, the system lacked one-touch join and automation features. Managing the on-site system was costly and time-consuming due to hardware upgrades, replacement of end-of-life servers, cabling, and data configuration.
Parexel partnered with us to revolutionize the way the company communicates. The transformation was remarkable. A global workforce migrated seamlessly to Microsoft Teams Connect Calling and Meeting Room solutions. Productivity sky-rocketed by 40%. Meetings are now collaborative and engaging thanks to advanced features and user capabilities.
In addition, Parexel achieved major cost- savings and improved efficiency by switching 5,000 PSTN users to chat, meetings, and calling features. This change will save the Parexel an estimated $360K annually!
“Along with successfully implementing a complex Teams Calling solution install, my team has relied on Continuant to deploy over 100 Microsoft Teams Rooms. Continuant also provided managed services for Teams Calling and Teams Rooms. Account Management and Day 2 engineering have been a lifeline for my team to maximize our critical communication systems infrastructure.”
Sean McNamara | Senior Unified Communications Architect | Parexel