Molson Coors to save £600,000 in three years with SIP trunking

Migration from legacy systems to enable greater collaboration

Brewer Molson Coors has predicted it will save £600,000 in three years after migrating to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking.

Communications provider Kcom has been supplying all of the company's telephony including voice and data in the UK for more than 10 years. It identified a number of new technologies in a bid to help Molson Coors achieve cost savings and move towards a more agile and scalable infrastructure.

Ralph Kelly, account manager at Kcom, explained that moving to a SIP-based architecture meant that instead of calls travelling over standard public switched telephone network (PSTN), they travel over an IP data network.

"SIP trunking connects existing PBX telephone equipment to the PSTN directly over an IP-based data link such as IP-VPN or Ethernet as opposed to ISDN, which is legacy TDM technology," he said.

Simon Odell, IT director, vendor and service management at Molson Coors UK and Ireland, told Computing that the two main drivers for migrating to SIP trunking were the cost benefits and better collaboration ability.

"We saw the cost benefits and we saw the ability to build a platform that enabled greater collaboration and removed some of the barriers to communication that we get from some of the traditional infrastructures," he said.

Odell said that the brewer had many ISDN 30 lines and PSTN lines, which were used for inbound and outbound calls and that Molson Coors wanted to move away from relying on these lines to reduce the overheads on storage space and power consumption.

Kcom advised Molson Coors to run Microsoft Lync, Cisco IPT and Avaya IPT over the internet protocol because the voice collaboration tools would allow the brewer to combine its internet with voice calls and remove the need for broadband provision for home workers.

Odell said that the company is now hopeful of saving £600,000 in its first three years.

"We've reduced our cost base of running the infrastructure and that's an on-going benefit for us.

"Kcom helped to drive our business strategy even if it meant a reduction in the amount of revenue going to them," he said.

Kelly explained how SIP trunking would enable Molson Coors to save costs.

"Unlike traditional ISDN or analogue line connections, SIP trunks are not geographically tied to locations. This enables organisations with multiple connections from multiple offices to consolidate their lines through SIP trunks.

"Individual locations are no longer treated as separate entities and are effectively brought together through a VoIP-based solution that centralises the connectivity to the PSTN. This brings cost-savings because calls within the organisation, no matter how diverse the locations, are free," he said.

Odell did not disclose the amount the solution had cost but said that the company would see a return on investment one year after implementation.

The order for SIP trunking was given in January 2011 and implementation was completed in December 2011.