Trent Smith, Vice President and General Manager of Van Ausdall & Farrar’s IT and Communications divisions, notes that the company had a premise-based phone system from Mitel for many years. That system enabled inbound and outbound calls from office-based landline phones — and not much else. As Trent explains, this became a top-priority challenge in 2020.
“Suddenly, we were facing the pandemic shutdowns — and a company that had been bricks and mortar for its entire history now needed to support communication capabilities for 150 employees working from home across Indiana.”
Trent and his team researched the remote and mobile capabilities of both the company’s existing phone system and a few others, and they found the same challenges with them all.
“There are so many components to manage if you’re trying to build infrastructure for remote users — servers, other on-prem hardware, an edge gateway — all of which need to be configured properly and monitored constantly. Plus, there’s a single point of failure: If your gateway fails, all remote users lose communication. And this was something that happened to us more than once as we were working our way through the early days of the lockdowns.”
When the Mitel-RingCentral partnership formed, Van Ausdall jumped at the opportunity both to upgrade their Mitel premise systems to the unified RingEX cloud platform and also to become a resale partner at the same time. This way, the company could improve its own internal communications and add a compelling solution for its clients.
“We couldn’t find a single limitation of the RingCentral solution or a missing component that we needed,” Trent explains.
