Microsoft Lync Server 2010Customer Solution Case Study

IT Services Firm Upgrades Communication Solution to Better Serve Customers

OverviewCountry or Region: FinlandIndustry: IT services

Customer ProfileFinland-based Tieto is a large, global IT service provider founded in 1968. The company, which creates software for enterprises in many industries, employs close to 17,000 people.

Business SituationTieto wanted to ensure that its employees receive the latest communications technology to improve business processes and drive productivity.

SolutionTieto deployed Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to take advantage of improved hardware options for high availability and an improved user interface.

Benefits Improved user experience Reduced total cost of ownership Able to provide better solutions for

customers

“We experienced great cost savings from our Office Communications Server deployment. Now we want to offer employees a seamless experience for voice and conferencing, and make it easy to connect across borders.”

Michael Wittwer, Worldwide Alliance Manager, Tieto

Based in Finland, Tieto is the largest computer services and software solution provider in the Nordic region of Northern Europe. Most of the company’s employees are located in separate offices and collaborate virtually on customer projects. The company has been rapidly expanding its deployment of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, now called Microsoft Lync Server with the 2010 release. To continue to provide employees with the latest voice technology and gain experience to share with its customers, Tieto has deployed Lync Server 2010. Tieto expects Lync Server to provide an improved user experience together with the Microsoft Lync 2010 client, which is the single user interface for all Lync Server communications. Lync Server also requires less hardware in many situations, which will help Tieto and its customers reduce the cost of supplying communications capabilities.

SituationTieto is an international IT services company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. One of Europe’s largest IT services providers, Tieto has offices in 26 countries and employs nearly 17,000 people. The organization delivers software solutions and consulting services to enterprises in the public administration, finance, telecommunications, forest industries, and other sectors. Its largest customers reside in Northern Europe, Germany, and Russia.

As an IT services provider, Tieto must maintain an excellent communications infrastructure to help its dispersed workforce complete projects efficiently and to show customers that it can manage and deliver the latest communications technologies.

Tieto recently upgraded its communications infrastructure to include Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. With the new communications capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007, Tieto employees could quickly and easily collaborate by audio, video, or web conference with their colleagues in competency centers around the world. As a result, Tieto has significantly reduced its costs related to long-distance calling and offsite meetings. “We have already reduced travel by 25 percent, and we have reduced total travel costs by 15 percent companywide thanks to our strong collaboration infrastructure. Office Communications Server 2007 and extensive audio and video conferencing capabilities play a strong role in that,” says Michael Wittwer, Worldwide Alliance Manager, Tieto.

To take further advantage of its communications infrastructure, Tieto developed customer applications using the Office Communications Server application programming interfaces (APIs) to create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). “We do application development and business process consulting so we are very interested in the APIs and CEBP,” notes Ilkka Salomaa, Lead Service Architect at Tieto.

One application that Tieto created was a web-based chat console for its extranet based on Microsoft SharePoint Server, where customers can sign into the portal and view presence information for support staff and initiate a chat directly with the contact they need. Tieto also created a solution called Future Office, an information worker productivity solution. “Using Office Communications Server 2007 developer tools, we easily created a new office application that gives our workers voice capabilities,” adds Salomaa.

The Future Office application is helping to boost productivity for Tieto employees. Because it has a user interface similar to widely used Microsoft Office applications, Tieto employees quickly learn how to use it. The familiar user interface means that these employees can spend less time training and more time working. “Our Future Office solution, which integrates Office Communications Server 2007 functionality, definitely makes our information workers more productive,” says Wittwer.

Tieto is able to show its customers how they can use applications based on Office Communications Server 2007 in day-to-day

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operations. “We have seen that the best demonstration we can make to our enterprise customers is to show we have made these applications work in our own company,” Wittwer says. “It serves as a showcase to our customers.”

Tieto has expanded its Office Communications Server voice deployment to more than 7,000 users in 16 countries, enabling the company to retire private branch exchange (PBX) equipment and offer employees improved telephony service. Tieto believes its investments in communications have been a huge success. So when the company had the opportunity to be an early adopter of Microsoft Lync Server 2010, it moved quickly deploy it.

With the Lync Server 2010 deployment, Tieto wanted to improve communications for its internal users. “We experienced great cost savings from our Office Communications Server deployment. Now we want to offer employees a seamless experience for voice and conferencing, and make it easy to connect across borders. We want to show them that they have state-of-the-art technology,” explains Wittwer. Tieto wants to make it easy for employees to participate in ad hoc collaboration and online meetings with different devices and from any location, whenever they need to.

Tieto also wanted to evaluate Lync Server 2010 to see how it could offer better service to customers. Wittwer continues, “We like to put new technology into our complex environment before we offer it to customers.” Through the early-adopter program, Tieto continues to participate in product development with Microsoft,

especially for the Microsoft Lync Online hosted solution.

SolutionTieto deployed Microsoft Lync Server 2010 at three locations. The central site has an Enterprise pool of Lync Server 2010 with collocated mediation servers. The site also has an audiovisual conferencing pool, a monitoring server, and an edge server pool. This configuration provides high availability and enables communications with people outside the corporate network. Tieto is using a NET gateway to connect to the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) and uses media bypass technology to facilitate improved voice communications.

The second site has a standard server configuration, which handles all of the Lync communications traffic from a single server, providing a cost-efficient solution. The final site uses a NET survivable branch appliance (SBA) to provide a highly available voice and conferencing solution at a branch office. When an SBA is deployed at a branch office, communications traffic can flow over the corporate network or directly to the PSTN, providing high availability at a low cost. Tieto implemented call admission control within Lync Server 2010 to manage bandwidth constraints without configuring external equipment.

Tieto has taken advantage of the deployment and management tools available with Lync Server 2010 as well. Using the Topology Builder, an application engineer can quickly define all the parameters required to design a new installation. Topology Builder then communicates with the servers to install the correct configuration. For management,

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“We are very happy with the Plantronics headsets. They provide good voice quality and a smooth transition for employees who replaced their desk phones, giving them the ability to use the rich feature set Lync provides to manage their calls and conferences.”Mikko Silonsaari, Senior Service Architect,

Tieto

improved Windows PowerShell capabilities and the web-based management console provide additional options for administrators.

To facilitate the evaluation of enterprise voice capabilities, employees piloting Microsoft Lync 2010 on their desktop computers received new voice over IP (VoIP) phones optimized for Lync Server. Some employees received Plantronics Voyager PRO UC headsets, while others chose Polycom CX600 IP phones. Tieto also deployed some Polycom CX500 common area phones and found them easy to set up and manage with Lync 2010. Salomaa explains, “Support for common area phones in Lync will help with our internal deployment. Some countries have a great need for these phones for cultural reasons and this capability will help us deploy enterprise voice at those locations.”

Employees are using many of the Lync Server voice capabilities, including Call Park, which they can use to hold a call so someone else can retrieve it on common area phones. Workers are also enjoying the Voice Quality Diagnostics, which alert them to connection issues. Tieto also likes the improvements to Response Groups, which it uses extensively, especially the ability place calls from the Response Group rather than from an individual extension.

Employees also appreciate how the new Lync 2010 client provides a single point of access to all conferencing and voice functions. With Microsoft Lync Web App, employees can join conferences from Linux or Macintosh computers as well.

With all of these new capabilities, Tieto would like to deploy Lync 2010 to all employees as quickly as possible, but the company expects a period of coexistence with Office Communication Server. Tieto’s testing has shown that coexistence should be a seamless experience for employees, which gives Tieto confidence to recommend the solution to customers.

BenefitsWith the deployment of Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Tieto has improved its internal communications capabilities and gained valuable experience that it shares with its customers that have Lync deployments.

Improved User ExperienceWith the upgrade to Lync Server 2010, Tieto is delivering on its goal to provide state-of-the-art communications capabilities to its employees. Employees who are using Lync for voice and conferencing have reported that the user interface is well organized and that they can easily set up and join ad hoc or planned conferences. “With Lync it’s easy to join a meeting. You can join from the Outlook reminder without opening the meeting invitation or even from the IP phone calendar with just one click,” explains Mikko Silonsaari, Senior Service Architect at Tieto. “Adding the meeting lobby and providing more conferencing functions like white boarding, presentations, and file transfers provides a better user experience.”

They are also excited about the phone hardware available for Lync. “We are very happy with the Plantronics headsets. They provide good voice quality and a smooth transition for employees who replaced their

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“For voice, the topology changes are great. Collocating the Mediation server provides big cost savings, and the SBA for voice and conferencing makes it easier to deploy Lync to customers with multiple locations.”Mikko Silonsaari, Senior Service Architect,

Tieto

desk phones, giving them the ability to use the rich feature set Lync provides to manage their calls and conferences,” explains Silonsaari. “The Polycom phones provide a great user experience and are easy to set up and manage.”

Reduced Total Cost of OwnershipChanges to the topology requirements and management capabilities of Lync will also help to reduce the total cost of ownership for Tieto. The ability to collocate Mediation servers on Lync front-end servers saves hardware. Mediation servers can also now communicate with more than one gateway, which reduces the number of servers required. Finally, by using call admission control, Tieto can control bandwidth usage without installing additional, costly third-party hardware.

Better Solutions for CustomersTieto plans to put its experience with Lync to use for its customers. With Lync Server 2010, Tieto can enhance its extranet portal with capabilities like Skill Search, so customers can search for the customer service representative who can help resolve their issues.

The topology changes will make it much easier for Tieto to offer its customers full voice deployments using Lync Server. “For

voice, the topology changes are great. The Mediation server collocation together with the media bypass feature provide big cost savings, and the SBA for voice provides much needed local resiliency and makes it easier to deploy Lync to with multiple locations,” explains Silonsaari. “Also, the addition of features like Call Park makes it much easier to convince customers to retire their PBX systems.”

Microsoft Lync Server 2010Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative and engaging and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.

For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to: www.microsoft.com/lync

55This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Software and Services Microsoft Office− Microsoft Lync 2010− Microsoft Office Communications

Server 2007 R2− Microsoft Office Communicator 2007

R2 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft Lync Server 2010− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Hardware NET Survivability Branch Appliances Plantronics Voyager PRO UC Headsets Polycom CX Series IP Phones

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Tieto Corporation products and services, call +(358) 207 2010 or visit the website at: www.tieto.com

For more information about NET products and services, call (800) 234-4638 or visit the website at: www.net.com

For more information about Plantronics products and services, call (800) Plantronics or visit the website at: www.plantronics.com

For more information about Polycom products and services, call (800) Polycom or visit the website at: www.polycom.com