Kevin Cohee needed the economies of scale of a nationwide bank to reach his goal of providing black neighborhoods with access to capital and other bank services normally reserved for larger banks. As chairman and CEO of OneUnited Bank, Cohee's successful growth-by-acquisition strategy quickly fused a collection of small financial institutions into one national institution, but that rapid growth brought major headaches to Cohee's CTO, Jim Barry.

The price for newfound status as the nation's largest African-American-owned bank was a patchwork of incompatible and often obsolete phone systems that were a nightmare to manage. Each constituent bank brought its own voice switch and local service contract to the party, and every new acquisition was increasing this complexity.

Before 2002 ended, the retail bank had 12 offices and 164 employees in three states--the headquarters and one additional location in Boston, two offices in Miami and eight in the greater Los Angeles area. Some of the switches were so old that finding anyone who knew how to work on them was difficult; the bank was also spending a fortune on Centrex.

In the three different markets, the local phone companies had provided similar packages of Centrex coupled with a Meridian PBX. Each site was managed individually, and using Centrex-based virtual tie lines to connect branches was the economic inverse of toll bypass. Outsourced voice mail added to the inconvenience and expense.

Any problems or changes required a truck roll by the local service-contract provider, and response times ranged from days to weeks. In other words, Cohee had achieved his bank unification goal but there was nothing unified about the Boston-based outfit's voice network.

"It was very inefficient, and our telecom costs were running away with us," says Barry. "The phone system and the vendors were managing us instead of the other way around. We knew OneUnited was going to continue to grow by acquisition, so we needed to pull everything together."

VOICE OVER IP CHOSEN

Barry's wish list for a new communications system included unified management, single-system view, support for multisite workgroups and automatic call distributors (ACDs), consolidated dialing, call redirection across sites, hoteling capability, and toll bypass.

The toll-bypass requirement dictated running voice over the bank's existing IP data network, and voice/data convergence was clearly the way of the future, according to Barry. When he and his team embarked on a search for a VoIP platform in mid-2000, however, there were not many options on the market.

"We're a lean and mean operation, and the winning platform had to offer immediate business benefits and promise a quick return on investment," Barry offers.

Such concerns put telephony unification on the back burner for more than two years as OneUnited (then called the Boston Bank of Commerce) refined its IT strategy and let the VoIP technology mature. By 2002, however, successive acquisitions raised the pain of dealing with all the growing complexity to the breaking point. VoIP migration became a priority, and the leading candidates were revisited.

One platform based on data-networking technology was rejected as too complex and expensive, and a PBX vendor was eliminated after an off-site test of its VoIP solution. "Shoreline Communications offered the most features per dollar," Barrys explains. "and gave us a choice of handsets: IP phones, PC-based softphones or inexpensive traditional phones. We also liked the fact that its VoIP system was not a retrofit of legacy voice or data platforms.

"And their system was the only one that had a single management interface," he adds. "The others were a consolidation of three or four different ones."

Barry cites the reliability of the Shoreline system, which is based on a call-control architecture that distributes call processing across every voice switch in the network. "There is no single point of failure with this approach, and there is high system availability," he says.

Each switch, he notes, can function as a standalone system, providing each branch with autonomy, and multiple switches in a network can back each other up. "The solution at least matches and potentially exceeds the 'five nines' availability of traditional voice systems, and yet offers the efficiency and economy of plug-and-play replacement," Barry says.

IMPLEMENTED AT 12 LOCATIONS

OneUnited began active discussions with Shoreline in early 2002, and implemented an in-house test in June. The bank's CEO, CFO and board of directors approved the purchase; acquisition and implementation began in August. The first site was up and running in September.

Barry says he and his staff learned the interface easily and had rolled eight offices over to the network by October. The four most recently acquired branches were added in early 2003. The total implementation cost for the 12-site network was $225,000.

"It's the easiest cutover I've ever experienced-basically one NT administrator sitting at a desk with a Web interface vs. an entire vendor project team at each site during the rollout," Barry states. "We could truly achieve self-service. And it's virtually seamless for the users. We just had to show the tellers how to transfer calls, and the more advanced users needed about an hour of training on the Shoreline Call Manager.