The Backstory
Riyad Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the Middle East, needed a solution to efficiently manage unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) for a distributed workforce of nearly 10,000 employees across 300 branches and international offices in London, Houston, and Singapore.
The Challenge: Managing Growth with Limited Tools
Riyad Bank’s IT team had been managing their Cisco CallManager environment solely through the native administration portal, but the process was tedious and inefficient. As the bank’s workforce expanded and collaboration needs grew, pressure mounted to streamline operations and reduce manual work.
To meet these demands, they needed to:
- Reduce time spent on repetitive administrative tasks and complex multi-click workflows
- Eliminate using spreadsheets for number management
- Ensure compliance with call-recording policies across a large user base
- Quickly identify and recover from configuration drift and human error
The Solution: Why Riyad Bank Chose Kurmi
Riyad Bank needed a better way to manage its complex unified communications environment. Their existing UC administration relied heavily on manual processes across native Cisco tools, creating inefficiencies and increasing the risk of errors. To simplify operations, reduce admin overhead, and improve compliance visibility, they turned to Kurmi’s centralized UC service management platform.
What drew them to Kurmi was the ability to automate time-consuming tasks like provisioning, deprovisioning, and MACDs (moves, adds, changes, deletes)—all from a single interface. They also required clearer visibility into call recording configurations and phone number availability, which is essential for maintaining compliance and ensuring operational efficiency in a banking environment.
The Results: What Riyad Bank Gained with Kurmi
Once Riyad Bank deployed Kurmi’s centralized UC service management platform, the results were noticeable quickly:
- 50% reduction in daily UC admin time
Manual, multi-step tasks, including provisioning, deprovisioning, and MACDs that previously required switching between Cisco tools, were consolidated into just a few clicks. This automation freed up hours each day for the IT team to focus on strategic work.
- Clear visibility into call recording configurations
Kurmi enabled the team to proactively manage compliance by providing real-time insights into which users were being recorded and whether their settings were correctly applied.
- Automated, centralized number management
Replacing error-prone spreadsheets, Kurmi’s number management tool offered automated tracking and allocation of phone numbers and extensions. Plus, write-back to Active Directory seamlessly updates the user’s profile with their new phone number, eliminating the need for manual updates and reducing the risk of assignment conflicts.
- Instant auditing and rollback of admin errors
Mistakes happen, but with Kurmi, the team could audit changes and instantly reverse errors with one click, minimizing downtime and improving confidence in day-to-day operations.
“Kurmi is a necessary tool for environments with a large number of UC users.”
– Yazan Huzayen, Communication Network Consultant, Riyad Bank
Kurmi in Action: How Riyad Bank Transformed Its UC Administration
With Kurmi, Riyad Bank modernized their UC operations. The centralized platform streamlines user management and empowers the IT team with flexibility across admins, roles, and branches.
The result is a faster, more efficient IT environment with stronger internal SLAs and higher business satisfaction. By automating routine UC tasks, Kurmi not only eliminated the burden of manual processes but also laid the foundation for Riyad Bank’s broader automation strategy, freeing the IT team to focus on high-impact initiatives supporting the bank’s growth.
