Case Studies

HCLTech is a technology leader, with more than 223,000 employees across 60 countries providing digital, engineering, cloud, and AI solutions to organizations worldwide. They were recently engaged by a multi-national food and beverage company for a UC solution and turned to Kurmi to help manage the large, heterogeneous environment.

We spoke with Ronak Agarwal, Senior Consultant at HCLTech, about the engagement.

Tell us about HCLTech and your firm’s relationship with Kurmi.

I’m Ronak Agarwal, Senior Consultant at HCLTech, a multinational IT services and consulting firm headquartered in Noida, India. We have been partners with Kurmi for 4 years, selling it as a part of a managed service offering called HCLTech Rendezvous.

What is the value proposition around Kurmi for your clients?

HCLTech’s Rendezvous, an in-house framework and product, lies at the center of a re-imagined operating model for managing UC infrastructure. HCLTech Rendezvous has 3 modules, Discover, Monitor, and Automate, which is where Kurmi falls.

Kurmi helps our customers automate UC use cases related to Proactive, Preventative and Reactive Maintenance like MACD’s, Phone (or User) provisioning/deprovisioning, DID management, Self Serve Portal, Bulk Upgrades, Migration from one platform to another, and API Integration with ITSM tools—to name a few!

As part of our managed service Automation offering, Kurmi is typically used to automate from 30%-50% tickets/incidents/service requests for our clients.

Describe the customer’s deployment using Kurmi with your HCLTech Rendezvous offering.

Our client was looking for a solution to manage their large heterogenous environment, remove manual IT errors, automate repetitive tasks, improve employee efficiency and most important, reduce cost of IT support. One of the primary reasons they reached out to us was our domain expertise in providing value added services in the Unified Communications space.

Our client will use HCLTech Rendezvous Automate (powered by Kurmi) to automate the management of MACDs [moves, adds, changes, deletes] for end users as well as management of DID numbers. We will also integrate with their ITSM solution for further automation. The initial deployment will be to 25,000 users.

What benefits from deploying Kurmi do you expect for your client, once the solution is deployed?

We expect to deliver single-pane-of-glass management of a heterogeneous (on-prem and cloud) UC environment with 50%-70% of configuration changes ultimately to be handled through Kurmi instead of logging into the client’s PBXs. As Kurmi is integrated with these PBXs and ITSM, we expect at least 80% of MACDs to be automated end-to-end. In addition, we expect to automate 30%-40% of Incidents and Changes, and to deliver paperless DID management within 6 months of deployment. Finally, we expect a reduction in MTTR (mean time to repair) by 20% year/year, and for the self-serve portal to ultimately reduce the number of support tickets as well.

Some intangible benefits we expect are: reduction in support cost for the client due to reduction in engineers year/year and at least 20% improved engineer efficiency year/year, all due to the automation.

IT Pain Points

This school district exemplifies the journey of many institutional organizations to modernize their business communications infrastructure. The school district enrolls more than 6,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and  employs a staff of 700 people across 10 buildings, so it is easy to see why the half-dozen people in the IT team were spread so thin. The phone system operated by reassigning users to their extension. In addition, technical staff had to populate 15 different fields every time there was a staff move. These factors resulted in an outdated, error-prone process.

A Comprehensive Solution

The drive to upgrade was focused on automating repetitive tasks. As is true of so many school districts, there were no major automation or cost-cutting initiatives in place. The Assistant Director of Technology for the school district initiated the project by securing funding for a system upgrade. He began with an online search for “automating UCS” and “UCS management utility,” among other terms. He found only two or three vendors and requested demos and quotes from all of them. He then made his decision to go with Kurmi Software based on the strengths of our solution, which improves security and reduces risk.

With Kurmi, the school district was able to reduce provisioning time from 30 minutes down to a few seconds per user. Implementing the system took just one week. The school district uses Microsoft Active Directory, Cisco UCS, and Jabber. Feedback from the three-person technical staff is that the software’s stability and efficiency makes their jobs easier. Its user-centric interface lets them delegate repetitive provisioning tasks to users. These users welcome the autonomy, and IT team members are freed up to complete other more important projects. This streamlined process is a win for everyone involved.

Key Features Utilized

Kurmi is multi-vendor and hybrid by nature. It provides a central control point for managing all your Unified Communications apps in a hybrid and multi-vendor environment. This means there’s no need to search through multiple screens to find the devices and services associated with a user, nor are multiple templates required to make changes. And one-click tiles enable easy updates to the user’s profile. Our single platform reduces operating costs.

Nemertes found that businesses of 2,500-10,000 employees require an average of 3.9 FTEs to manage their Unified Communications and Collaboration infrastructure. This situation is no longer tolerable – or necessary – in the information age. UC Management can take the complexity out of operations!

A cooperatively-owned wholesale bank

Operating a wholesale bank as part of a nationwide system with nine other districts is not an easy task. Our client is comprised of 15 institutions with a total of 225 branches and 2,200 employees. This client exemplifies the journey of many large banks to modernize their business communications infrastructure.

The bank’s point person is part of a small team supporting telephony together with a solutions architect and another part-time resource. It needed a multi-tenant provisioning solution to offer telephony to its constituent. As a result of the  significant cost advantage in moving to VoIP, the bank built a VoIP Cisco CUCM infrastructure.

The solutions architect looked online for a multi-tenant provisioning tool and saw that the Kurmi Unified Communications Management (UC Management) toolset could meet all their needs.

UC Management to the rescue

The solution is used to delegate MACD to the help desk. With Kurmi, the bank was able to transition MACDs to Customer Service; three or four of the 15 employees there can use Kurmi as a “black box” for provisioning. The bank is also using the license-tracking module.

The solution went live within three months. With zero-touch provisioning with Active Directory integration, the bank has improved consistency in MACDs with minimized data input. Thanks to Advanced delegation features (role-based management) as well as rollback and scheduling capabilities, they have simplified their setup and monitoring for day-to-day management of their Enterprise Communications systems.

Thanks to Kurmi, the bank’s Unified Communications and Collaboration experts can now focus on new projects rather than everyday request tickets. They are delegating day-to-day management to employees with no UC skills, such as helpdesk staff, local administrators, and HR assistants. Understandably, the architect has become a big fan, and says he’s “completely sold” on Kurmi.

Metrigy found that businesses of 2,500-10,000 employees require an average of 3.9 FTEs to manage their Unified Communications and Collaboration infrastructure. This situation is no longer tolerable – or necessary – in the information age. UC Management can take the complexity out of operations!

Giving back time to your IT staff

Kurmi UC Management software transformed the MACD process for this firm  from a delicate process only a certified communications specialist could carry out into a simple point-and-click task. In addition, most errors were removed and the process can now be expedited. The company was able to transfer the MACD responsibility from the IT department to the help desk. Provisioning can be performed as part of the onboarding and offboarding of employees. The effortless process freed up two FTEs in the overloaded IT organization.

Nemertes found businesses between 2,500 and 10,000 employees require an average 3.9 FTEs to manage their Unified Communications and Collaboration infrastructure. This situation is both no longer tolerable and no longer needed in this age of automation. UC Management can take the complexity out of operations!

A demanding distributed business

This large clothing company exemplifies the journey of many enterprises to modernize their business communications infrastructure. It manages a diversified portfolio of brands, marketed through department stores and a network of stores across the globe. Operating a distributed business with a global supply chain is not an easy task. The seasonal nature of the retail business requires a large number of additional part-time associates to be onboarded frequently. The company relies on state-of-the-art communications technology and made the improvement of its operating platforms including communications an investment priority.

The firm unified its business communications tools around Cisco Collaboration solutions, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager for telephony, Cisco Jabber for collaboration, Cisco Webex for conferencing, and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express for customer service. It also leveraged Microsoft Active Directory to help keep track of its fluid workforce.

A management headache

The management of such a sophisticated suite of communications tools turned out to be more complicated than expected. The company trained several of its communications specialists, but each employee had to be manually configured in each UC application. A single configuration could entail up to 20 different parameters. Rules and consistency had to be enforced across the various applications.

The company found only certified associates were able to perform these complicated tasks, which were still prone to human errors. In particular, the moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs) of employee profiles was consuming most of the specialists’ time.

UC Management to the rescue

The company turned to Kurmi’s Unified Communications Management (UC Management) suite when it realized that the management of its business communications tools was breaking the promise of Unified Communications (UC) and taking too much time from its certified associates. The deployment was easy to schedule and took a few weeks.

The company created employee profiles according to their communication needs. Provisioning rules were automated and enforced through Kurmi  allowing the configuration of an employee in the various communication applications to be done transparently based on their Active Directory information.