Capitalising on its NGN investment

JSE-listed Alexander Forbes provides financial and risk services to small, medium and large organisations, professional and specialist groups, and individual clients. Headquartered in Johannesburg, the company has operations in 30 countries worldwide, as well as a primary operations office in the UK.

The company started converting its network infrastructure to an all-IP network, with Cisco kit throughout, in 2003. Alexander Forbes has outsourced the running and management of its entire IT infrastructure to local Cisco partner Dimension Data since 2001. And it duly brought Dimension Data on board to design, implement and maintain its NGN.

Says Alexander Forbes' IT director Brad Eliot: "Since then, we've been gradually enhancing and improving the network, and rolling out IP solutions like IP telephony."

To date, Alexander Forbes has rolled out IP telephony (IPT) solutions to its head offices, all three of its Sandton offices, and some of its smaller branch offices. It is also completing an IPT deployment in one of the UK offices.

"Alexander Forbes is a very strong Cisco house; it seldom looks at other products," says Dave van Niekerk, network architect for Alexander Forbes at Dimension Data.

"The company typically adheres to Cisco principles and has adopted Cisco's Safe blueprint for security."

Van Niekerk says Dimension Data has deployed 2 600 IPT instruments, from the basic to touch-screen colour-coded instruments.

Having a single cabling infrastructure for voice and data... has halved costs and the time [taken] to get the infrastructure in place.

Brad Eliot, IT director, Alexander Forbes

"One of the big savers [for Alexander Forbes] was having a single cabling infrastructure for voice and data," says Eliot.

"This has halved cable costs and the time to get the infrastructure in place has been drastically reduced," he adds, referring to a greenfields deployment the company did when one of its branches moved into new offices.

"From an initial setup perspective, there was a saving. And since deployment, we've seen nice savings when people move. We no longer need to re-path cables; the person just moves with their profile. They insert their pin and code into the phone at their new desk and the whole thing moves with them. This is a nice saving as we tend to move around a lot," he notes.

Alexander Forbes has been running voice over IP on its network for years. "IPT makes it easier in that we just insert digital cards into the PBX, which is helping us nicely." Eliot says the company is continuing with IPT deployments "as opportunities arise".

"For example, our Richards Bay office will be moving, so we will simultaneously move them off their old PABX onto an IPT solution. We'll likely have full deployment nationwide in the next two to three years. We're also looking to include the UK-based operations," he says.

The company already has one network linked to the UK, which gives it redundancy in that it can roll over to the UK call managers or dial plan if there is a failure locally.

Van Niekerk says Dimension Data is currently running a pilot for Alexander Forbes with 20 users at their respective homes. "Alexander Forbes is looking at letting some of its staff use an IPT phone or softphone at home in a bid to reduce costs and increase efficiency, for example, by allowing employees to miss out on rush hour traffic."

The company is also looking to integrate video into home user sites and remote sites, creating a virtual office environment, using Cisco's platform and IPT.

Eliot points out that the Cisco Safe blueprint provides information on how to best configure its network and environment in order to get the best out of the technology, while ensuring it remains secure. "We plan to continue doing that, improving our firewalls and so on."

Alexander Forbes also makes use of Cisco's content positioning functionality. The company moves content to where it is needed overnight, to regional offices, for example, so it can be accessed from local servers, rather than remotely from its point of origin.

Eliot says this saves costs, because bandwidth is so expensive, by reducing traffic across the WAN.

"Cisco has just upgraded its caching engine," he adds, noting that Alexander Forbes will be moving to the new version in this financial year. In addition, the firm is engaged with a server consolidation exercise, having just finished deploying a server farm.

With all its servers in one centrally managed place, it makes the management thereof significantly easier.