Aztecsoft, a software engineering service partner with staff strength of over 2,200 people, was finding it difficult to manage such a huge global workforce. Locating the employees during business needs, assigning tasks and getting deliverables from employees was really tough. This was directly impacting its services.

While the customer interaction was going down, the process involved in preparing a sales bid was too cumbersome. Discussing the project with the internal team and preparing the project plan to offer the bid to the customer took as much as 56 days as the approvers were based out of different locations. Long telephone calls, massive messages and increased travel costs were the problem, and communication costs were going through the roof.

Managing a global workforce, improving customer interaction, reduction of sales cycle and bid management time and reducing communication costs were a few other objectives.

It was then that Aztecsoft decided to opt for Cisco Unified Meeting Place Express solution, which is an integrated voice, video, and Web conferencing solution that is deployed over internal networks. It supports industry-standard telephony and video protocol to help ensure connectivity with a range of solutions.

Aztecsoft employees could set up and attend meetings quickly and easily from a variety of different interfaces, including Microsoft Outlook calendars. Simple and powerful conferencing functions, including integrated meeting management and control enabled Aztecsoft to conduct highly productive virtual meetings where staff could collaborate on any document with co-workers, demonstrate products and deliver compelling presentations, train employees, customers, and partners.

Cisco also offered its Cisco Unified Presence solution that collects information from multiple sources about user availability and communications capabilities, to provide rich presence status and facilitate presence-enabled communications with Cisco Unified Communications and other critical business applications. This scalable and easy-to-manage solution could help Aztecsoft to:

Increase productivity:  Connect with colleagues on the first try by knowing their availability in advance on the Cisco Unified IP Phone.

Enhance collaboration:  Share availability information and instant messages with co-workers within their business with Cisco Unified Personal Communicator.

Streamline communications:   View telephony status of co-workers from Microsoft Office Communicator, and simply click to call them through Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Presence-enabled business applications:   Expose presence information and user communications capabilities in corporate Web directories, point of sales applications, or customer relationship management systems through Cisco Unified Application Environment and standards-based APIs on Cisco Unified Presence.

Improve customer satisfaction:   Allow experts anywhere in the enterprise to handle calls with presence capabilities delivered with Cisco Unified Presence.

Benefits

By leveraging the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express solution and Cisco Unified Presence solution, Aztecsoft observed 40 percent reduction in communication costs. Managing the global workforce became very easy.

Bids were put together and refining of the plan was done in real-time. Meetings were automatically created to dial out the key executives and approvers. The meeting group discussed the bid, made changes to the bid and approved the final version over desktop video conferencing in just one meeting.

This reduced iterations by leveraging collaboration tools and increased the business value as it improved the sales force productivity, enabled faster decision-making and reduced the end-to-end bid cycle from 56 days to 15 days.