Interoute: Best Practice Sales Reference Study

"Special tenx to Nelson Tavares da Silva - Account Director Interoute (Amsterdam) more information review his LinkedIn profile: link"

1 Customer: DQ&A

Products: Interoute One and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007

 

2 Business background

DQ&A are an international on-line advertising company. They place advertising campaigns, at the right time, live on the website of the client. Results are then scanned and feedback and advice is given about the most popular banners, as well as which advertisement space is hot. DQ&A clients include MSN, AOL, Marktplaats, Hyves and Ilse Media. The company has offices in São Paulo, Cape Town, Stockholm, Madrid and Hamburg, and is headquartered in Voorburg, the Netherlands.

3 Business Drivers

DQ&A are serving customers from branch offices all over the world on a 24/7 base. They are looking to become the European market leader in Ad Operations and are expanding in to new markets in Southern Europe, North and South America at a great pace. Their main business driver is to reduce the costs of international calls and make more effective use of Microsoft OCS which is already used in some sites.

4 Challenges

During early 2008, DQ&A started its search for a new solution to replace their existing fixed line telephony which they currently use for all international calls. DQ&A are expanding fast and require a cost effective and easy to implement solution in many countries that will reduce the cost of International and between office calls.

‘Making international calls over fixed lines is still very expensive. But that’s not all. We are a fast growing organisation and we don’t want to be limited, as you are with fixed telephony, by the limitations of a PABX,’ said Peter van Wingerden, CEO of DQ&A.

5 Solution

Interoute One is the business quality and fully secure alternative for Skype-alike VoIP services. It adds telephony to the digital business environment, making the expensive and traditional PABX obsolete. An additional advantage of Interoute One is the unlimited availability of telephone numbers.

Interoute One works with IT standards like Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) and makes VoIP as easy to manage and as cost effective as e-mail. OCS combines all forms of communication like chat, VoIP, audio, video and web conferencing in one user friendly system. All incoming and outgoing phone calls between offices and business partners who are using the OCS platform are free. Calls to fixed and mobile numbers are at competitive rates.

Implementation

Good early dialogue with the DQ&A IT department ensured the project started quickly. Within a few months Interoute One was up-and-running. As DQ&A was already using an office system from the Microsoft family, the integration with Outlook, for example, was very simple and quick to do.

Peter Van Wingerden: ‘Interoute One is very quick to install. There were of course some small problems like there always are during any implementation. They didn’t hurt us however and within a few weeks the problems were solved.

For the mean time, due to customer choice, the new and old system is running in parallel. This is not an ideal situation and also more expensive for the customer.

Peter Van Wingerden: ‘The moment we stop using fixed landlines is a big step forwards for us as we will become totally dependent from the new system and it will also require a big culture change. We will move from the old system to the new one as soon as our employees feel comfortable with the new way of communication.

6 Results

DQ&A can make substantial savings on international phone calls with no degradation in quality. DQ&A can also have real time video conferences with for example their Hamburg office.

Peter Van Wingerden: ‘At European level, video conferencing has a perfect signal. There is no delay between speech and video image.’

Peter Van Wingerden thinks that Interoute One is the future. ‘The popularity of the system is growing and growing. It is more than normal that a technology company like us are is using this new technology. Our expectation is that we will save at least a minimum of 20% on our telephone cost in 2009 but I think it will be much more.’

Peter Van Wingerden: Return on investment and total cost of ownership are hard to present yet as we have just started a few months ago. But so far we are very pleased with how it goes and we have great faith in the product.

7 Sales approach

It all started with a good relationship between the two companies. First, DQ&A checked several references and then they formulated the criteria the Interoute solution should meet: efficiency, better scalability than existing phone systems, and last but not least: cost reduction.

A good international reputation, many strong customer references, quick implementation, flexibility and a good relationship made this sale a success.

8 Why did we win

DQ&A are taking a step by step approach to deploying Interoute 1 and OCS to their international offices. Interoute supports this global expansion plan by distributing the local phone numbers ourselves and this is a key reason DQ&A see Interoute as the perfect partner.