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G12 Communications Evergreen Health Case Study SIP Trunking and Fax over SIP - {Evergreen Health and G12 Communications discuss how moving to SIP Trunking and Fax over SIP significantly reduced operating cost, while streamlining hardware deployments.} good afternoon everyone Rick Garcia with g12 Communications we're doing another video case study today we're talking with one of the North West's largest health systems evergreen health care now with over 30 locations they obviously serve an important role in the community particularly now with today's pandemic environment we will be talking with portfolio communications also portfolio is one of the most trusted telecom consulting firms in the northwest so this is a case study meant to tell a visual story however Green came to be a g12 customer what products they use what problems we may have had a hand in solving and what the experience has been like what if anything they could pass on to others in their shoes so let's get to some introductions we have Greg cry singer Greg's the IT Director at evergreen hospital with 20-plus years of experience and Greg has supported some of the biggest brands in the Northwest including Starbucks primeira Blue Cross Expedia Philips Greg welcome to the call hey thanks Rick this is great I look forward to this discussion and I think he did me some justice by only saying 20 years this makes me feel old but at the end of the day what we're looking at is I think you can take the last 20 years and say what has changed in this space for voice and 20 years ago we were digital PBX system today where we've meshed voice and data and it all looks like one thing today so I think this will be a great discussion thanks thanks for the intro yeah yeah absolutely we also have one of the brightest young minds in healthcare technology and and having served in network engineering roles at some of the largest healthcare systems in the Northwest including Overlake and Swedish Sean Roma now serves as a senior network architected evergreen healthcare Sean welcome thanks Rick for that introduction yeah I'm excited to be here to see to talk about what G Toph has done for us and how great they've been for us yeah so looking forward to it awesome great thanks last but not least we've got Scott molar from portfolio communications now portfolio like I said earlier one of the most trusted advisors in the northwest for telecom and with 25 years plus experience in the telecom space you know Scott's customers and partners really listened to him he has their ear because he's got such great experience I mean the CenturyLink and and Quest and all in the enterprise space so Scott welcome to call thank you Rick thank nice introduction and you put me at 25 plus years but all that being said I'm very excited about this because this is a great example of where one of my favorite customers had some issues and some problems they wanted to solve and it was a feature of me bringing great people together to solve problems I'm excited about it yeah so Gregg goofily if you don't mind let's just get started we'll dive right in and and really if you could give us a bit of background on evergreen health care and just kind of some idea of you know what kind of facilities you you you work with and and just kind of the background there sure yes so evergreens comprised a couple campuses campuses we have one in Kirkland which has a number of buildings on it and then we have one in Monroe and then we have a multitude of remote standalone clinics and staff of about 6,000 the hospital was first built in the 60s in the space that it is now and it's just grown over time they've just added on to it every few years because of the growth in that Kirkland area and it's really besides over Lake it's one of the only hospitals on the east side that has has the capacity to take on that many patients really that that's kind of the story behind it it's so really when we came to when I came to Evergreen it was really a look at what are the systems that we have and you can really tell that it had grown from a very small community hospital with a few hundred doctors to now staff of more than 6,000 and then the challenges were in systems and policies and all those things so and that was really where we started to dig into it is is really where we were and and what direction did we want to go because when I got there it didn't seem like we had much of a direction so it was how do we put this in a direction and how do we when we spend money how do we make it so that we don't inconvenience those six thousand users with down times how do we improve unplanned outages how do we pollute improve maintenance windows so that's that was kind of where we started with a lot about three years ago right right so that that IT leadership right the granularity of process to kind of really smooth out the customer experience for you which would be all of the users within the organization there yeah and it did you know it doesn't do us any good to say hi we're here for my tea we're here to help you and then it never happens that way right or another thing that we put on you and you already all those 6,000 people already have a day job and then we come in and say we're gonna need like six hours of your time for a maintenance window what will happen well none of your systems will work during that time but you know it'll be okay because we're doing because at the end we're gonna give you something better and and you know at the end of the most of those people go yeah but it works now I don't understand so so that was our that was our guarantee to leadership that it when we spend money that we're spending it in the right places and we're we're giving the organization the ability to work during maintenance windows so that we're doing the right thing and it should be seamless because at the end of the day that those all the staff they don't they should know about IT or care about it they shouldn't care about the infrastructure all they should know is I come to work and it works and it runs and I'm happy because I have a job to do right very good very good well thanks great thing thanks for that now as for the telecommunications industry as far as telecommunications infrastructure goes maybe we can bring Sean in on this you know what were you running or what are you running Sean from a from a voice platform perspective yeah yeah here at Evergreen you know actually it's one of the first places that I've ever worked at that has a single unified platform for voice you know every place I've been it's got some flavor of Nortel some flavor of ayah and then hey babe decided to bring Cisco in a little bit later and then that migration has taken about half a decade or a full decade but yeah here at Evergreen you know there of 100% Cisco call manager's shop for IP phones we run a large Cisco enterprise environment for our network we have Cisco call manager phones IP phones on the desktop we have soft phones we have wireless phones you know we run our main campus on Kirkland you know kind of a centralized deployment for all of our remote sites they all phone back home to the mothership and you know we have a handful of Cisco is our routers running you know a few different flavors of call processing so we've recently I bought more g12 sip more internet you know insert portfolio here to come in a minute and you know half of the routers run cube and on cube we have internet connections strictly dedicated for those cube routers running that and then we have a few routers running you know the TDM stuff like PR ice you know with a couple of different providers either Centrelink or frontier and we're trying to you know we'll be retiring those shortly because they're pretty expensive right right so now do you run cubes in different locations or are they all at a physical location are they on separate IP connections what's that configuration look like yeah so you know the idea will be too soon distribute those anywhere really anywhere we want regardless of where it is on campus or even at a remote site or even a data center in Seattle but today you know we have a couple of setups where they sit behind you know Cisco fire power routers firewalls and they route out to the Internet we're moving over to a more using Cisco cube for what it was intended for it to be on the edge and we just plug internet straight in run a couple of access lists on there to protect it these internet circuits are now only meant to talk to g12 not the rest of the internet so that I think that does it that gives us a great sort of understanding of you know the the environment and and certainly the infrastructure from a telecommunication perspective now that this question really goes out to everyone here so I'd like to figure out I mean you know what were some challenges and and and maybe Scott you can kick things other things off because you brought us in together to me but what were some challenges you are facing as you were either as you were deploying or maybe the Cisco is sitting there with Scott once you kick things off there well like all projects start when when shanti means that hey i'm thinking about changing some things for the phone system and using some sep trunking etc and looking for certain features we had some initial conversations where it became clear that yes i need to do my regular job and make sure that i bring multiple provider bids in so that we get a competitive market price but more so was how does it work are they flexible is it going to be a good experience or is this going to be one of the hellish nightmares from cut overs of telco past like in my last 25 years or so that we've seen in complex cutover so the analysis was price and then also howdy how are you going to do it how do you recommend to do it and and can we work together on this so we actually interviewed in my head responses from all the major tier 1 telecom providers and then I just said you know we need to talk to g12 as well because of the localness of the company and also the flexibility of how once you get the numbers what you can do to help a customer that's far beyond what some of the others were able to offer so so was this Cisco platform in place already just with TDM infrastructure yeah sure so you know in that sense Cisco was already there Cisco that's you know again one of the great things about having worked at Evergreen is you know Cisco's been there since I've since before I've been there back then you know we were about three routers deep with about close to 20 PR i--'s running the environment between two data centers that were on campus so it was a you know you do the math that's a pretty expensive solution just for dial-tone so so Greg from an IT leadership perspective was it was one of the primary reasons for migrating to a sip solution was it to drive down cost yeah so that was one of the one of the reasons right and the other reason really was if you're if you're going to ask if you're going to spend because we had eight aging infrastructure then let's go see what we what we can do right how do we drive the hardware costs down if we don't need as much and not just repeat what was there before with new hardware and then we're set was that in our roadmap you know and it helps to have a roadmap so we were setting us up for the future what else can you add on to that and as we know PR i--'s have been around a long time they work fairly well they are expensive but and then they take a bunch of hardware so that was the other piece of it how do we see any down the hardware piece of it but still not sacrifice the availability and the redundancy of your voice system because as we know hospitals when when voice has a problem everybody has a problem so that was really it was really the aging infrastructure piece of it and then how do we drive the cost down help set a path for our roadmap that is really forward thinking you know one of the unique situations in working with hospitals is the 24-hour nature of your business right it's 24/7 so there's not there's not a good time to do the maintenance window there's not a good time to ever go down in the situation like that so so Scott brings in a multitude of carriers and then he brings in g12 and what were your thoughts upon meeting with a smaller carrier or courier like G 12 well let's go and do that because yeah really really at the end of the day I left it up to the architect to really what where do we want to go here's the vision we need to be as I said before it's we need to be forward-thinking and we need to not have to redo this again in a year that we can just build on it and then that's where Shaun took that and and and ran with it yeah so I think at the end of the day we're looking for a flexible SIP solution you know every area that I've worked with they weren't very flexible they would almost require you to do some sort of peering either over MPLS or something and have private circuits you know that you'd have to tie into and you'd be dedicated to you know if I had a Centrelink problem well I everybody had a Centrelink problem or a frontier the good thing about g12 that we found so attractive was you know I I could have an internet circuit from anybody didn't care you know anybody that was legitimate in that area you know geography made a difference because well if I had a CenturyLink service and I wanted you know one of our clinics which they are are in frontier territory we'll shoot but that's gonna be an expensive cost out the door so you know trying to think about how do we how do we keep cost down how do we have things you know highly available Scott had mentioned you know g12 and sip over the top and I go what is that oh that sounds cool you know let's look into that and one of the things I think and you know Rick correct me if I'm wrong but but we're working with a smaller carrier I think they're more open to ideas that the customer may have that you know a CenturyLink would really I know we keep picking on CenturyLink but you know it is what it is but you know they they they may look at you and be like are you joking you don't tell us what to do you don't tell us how things roll and you know with Rick being you know CEO and part owner of g12 it's like oh you sure this this he's like the head guy talking to me and asking me you know how do i how do I want to do it and yeah I mean like who are you what what who nobody ask these questions you know from the providers so you know we thought that was cool well you know we came from the wholesale space right and and so in the wholesale space everything is critical as well we're serving telecommunications customers and and and we're flexible because we do understand what the underlying infrastructure can and cannot do and so having that sort of knowledge behind us when we work with customers like evergreen that have some some unique requests or some validation so let's talk about real quick just the product set so right now it's SIP trunking and and phone numbers you do faxing why don't you just kind of roll into the fax and just kind of what do you guys use for faxing today basically it's write backs and then a zillion fax machines standalone fax machines out there finding a solution that worked for sip it took a little while but I think it's way more solid than a lot of people think in the industry that's all you hear is were stories about sip are you doing sip and then you're doing faxing over sip so and then we have some shuttle going to this but we have a newer design that will help us even improve our service and be able to troubleshoot faster and I think to get a better product for end-users we you know hospitals still do a ton of faxing it's crazy I really thought faxing died out a number of years ago we still do hundreds of thousands of faxes of years and then and then recently to accommodate I guess the pandemic sort of situations out there audio conferencing yeah so that was another big one we had a we've we've always had WebEx and now we have teams and then audio conferencing we had a number of bridges from g12 and then the pandemic hit and everybody freaked out as they should because it was all about communications we sent the first people home when that had laptops they automatically stayed at home then the next step was who doesn't have a laptop how do we get them home and then it was how do we communicate right so I think it's pretty crazy how fast you can do something when you have the whole organization behind it and you have the right vendors too that's the other piece of it you need we needed a I don't know how many we put in but it's it's a ton of audio conferences bridge conferences that we put in and and they work and we had we had a need for one that was I think it was at 80 normally cuz most of the people in the room and then we said hey brick we need one that goes to 250 and it was like Wow 250 so and you guys made it happen and we use those today so nobody's in a room anymore everybody either in their office or at home or somewhere in the hospital and they distance themselves and the key is that we have the ability to communicate and you know business goes on so so let's move this to signatures so you guys work on we come to an agreement you work on a contract and then the deployment phase and and is that fall on Sean and then Scott what were you thinking - from from a deployment strategy there was Sean do you but what was your strategy for implementing and then Scott you can chime in and tell us what that looks like typically and how this one was different yeah sure you know so we have you know we have we've had the four to five $8.99 block for forever you know the thousands and thousands of numbers and you know we essentially you know needed thousands and thousands of numbers in another contiguous block and so you know worried that we know we've got close to a 10,000 numbers need to be ported and we're just like all shoot you know so all right Rick is this gonna take us all year to get done cuz everybody else I've talked to they're like well we can maybe get it done in six months and it's like six months my gosh I don't know that I have you know I want to wait that long and so you know we come to you guys and you know it's you know your basic you're working on our schedule you know it's like well how fast can you do it like what I mean how fast can they do it like I said goes back to nobody asks me that question I'm pretty much you know you guys did it as fast as we could handle it because I've been involved in my my decades of experience I've been involved in a large number of significant phone system cut overs with hospitals and law firms nationwide etc and so I've been through the disasters I know what the gotchas are and so when we part of us was when we interviewed all the different to interior's some of them stood up and said well there's no way you can do this in less than a year or six months just for the porting alone and by the way we're gonna admit to you that we're gonna screw this up and it's not gonna go well and I said well that matches nice pass and the leadership at Evergreen here is saying hey we need this to go off without a hitch because we're a hospital and after talking with you Rick and doing all the prep and the pre design when this cut over what was it Sean like twenty six thousand DS to over in three minutes it was I don't know what the exact number was but it was very fast and the only problems that we actually faced were problems we created ourselves with four dings in other carriers that we totally forgot about and and that actually you know Rick was really fast to point out AI think this is you might have to call these guys and tell Nick that boarding off really fast and so it was it was a probably one of the best experiences I've had for a port that big anything it a lot of it was the prep work to prep work is almost everything right it's not really cut it's the prep work piece of it and we we piloted this with all of IT and Island it was some of people some people an IT that they even know where they were filing it which is a pretty good thing to write because there should have been no difference right I get calls I make calls somebody calls my number and it rings my phone right it's pretty straightforward it's all the pieces on the back end that are different now so that I think that was it was we piloted for quite a while and then I made that decision to cut over and it really that was a really a non-event so yeah that's the best you could hope for that's a great way to put it because that is the best you could hope for a non-event right yeah you're moving that many numbers over you know everyone's bracing for impact if you will and and it's just it just turns out to be a non-event so let's let me ask you about support guys I mean you know what do you think of g12 from for support purposes and how's your experience been working with us for anything we're support related really yeah I can start I think I just say that you're always there that's that's the key we we've had we had some issues early on with right backs and how they deliver or how they seamlessly integrate with sip and faxing just as a somewhat of a nightmare to to tune in to test and to make sure that it's doing what you wanted to do and then we've had some weird some of totally weird things like when we were black hold by the University of Washington and we couldn't figure it out and we had 27 people on that call on a Saturday and it's like what could this be and it was great because you you drilled down on it said all these numbers the same prefix let's see where they go oh they all go to this carrier oh they're all University of Washington numbers so that was it that was really an interesting one where you you didn't just say yeah it looks like it's not our it's not us our calls go through it was you were there and we went ah yeah okay well that probably makes sense how frustrating would that be you know to be a customer of a carry that says guys it's not us right I mean and and though it may not be us you were still experiencing some sort of impact that is still our service and yeah well it's clear it wasn't you you had nothing to do with it they black hole duh the fax numbers for some reason and they were getting busiest on every fax and as I said we fax hundreds of thousands of pages and it's patient impacting when they don't go through right so but that was I was one of the weirdest unique ones I've ever seen it eyes like how does that even happen right I never come across it yet either yeah but yeah and I think I'll let the other two guys speak to but it's I think like I said in beginning its you you're there when we call you you you're there and you're going through it it's either either it's us or it's the outside world outside of your network or you know you're there and you're you carry on all the way through it and like I said you don't just say well you know when you figure it out let us know what it was yeah yeah now very good so so from a from an IT leadership perspective where I give if you are talking to other health administrators or other healthcare IT leaders you know what would you say to them if they were looking at at either a deploying an IP infrastructure or a sip infrastructure really oh and and be you know using g12 if you don't have it already I mean you're going there everybody else is going away from digital for the most part and those who have dying out and so you're gonna pick out some kind of VoIP solution at the end of the day and then to make sure that two things make sure that that VoIP system that you have is rock-solid that you've already done all of those pieces that you need to do on it and then next piece is a good design for the SIP side of it that your redundant you have a che you can do these things make sure and think long term too and think the support side of it if you have an issue how do you do troubleshooting because troubleshooting on a digital system was really a piece of cake right what way easier I just moved into another port man it works right here it's way different well usually when something is impacting it's impacting everything so that's the key and and I think it just reiterate what I said it's been easy very easy to work with G 12 and your responsiveness you're always there so when we have it when we needed need bridge lines we need more we need to up how many sessions we have all those things are done they're not weeks on end and tons of paperwork it's very easy and very straightforward to work with you guys very good so so Shawn have you summarized some things for us so I mean you know what's uh what's it what's your experience been like on the technical side with maybe maybe with our support team or or anything else like that yeah you know kind of reiterate what Greg was saying yeah you're always there for us like you Rick are always there for us in addition to your support team you know we always know we can pick up the phone get the support we need and you know whether we ask you to jump on or not like sometimes it's like hey Rick's for details or I'm like what are you doing Rick we didn't ask for you this time but you know you're there you show up on the support guard it's like okay well you know it's cool so if you're from the support you know it's been great I have never for a second regretted that decision from you know going to sip from our old legacy you know TDM environment one of the things I would probably you know say that has been a lot of fun is working with Scott part of what we had to do in in preparation for this was go and get internet you know that and that's been kind of our my mantra for the past three years having Greg come on board you know like like anytime you get new leadership you take advantage of the situation or you tell them all the things that you don't think are working and you're like hey you know these are all the roadblocks for that I've had with previous leadership how can you help me and I need you to help me otherwise you know we're both gonna take these black guys with you starting and so you know what we did was went throw the contracts we went through every single contract we were like hey how do we save money how do we do this and this was actually a lot of fun working with Scott and the amount of money we saved operationally was just astronomical per month and in that year that you know just saying hey I've got a new service I'd like to spin up in g12 well all the money I saved it's like right here take my money you know and I'm glad you did you know I'm glad we worked towards it and the cost comparison between you know PRI and and Internet with this with SIP as a service on top of it it you know we've we've done so much very good very good and in Scott so so you didn't get any black eyes bringing in g12 and kept all your fingers and didn't experience any heart attacks or anything like that during a journey transitions right no what I can say this with good faith and I think the guys would agree with me any other situation and sometimes it does happen where it takes great leadership on the customer side to be able to have the confidence and their technical staff and their knowledge and their savvy to investigate a solution and actually go with what works best for them it could have very simply been very easy to hide and say I'm going with a Tier one provider because it's safe and it would have been a disaster and it would have been a failure and we would not be having fun having gone this route and done the extra research and having everybody come together for design this on the on the pre engineering side I think has enabled this to happen this is some ferociously courageous leadership that we're talking about here because it so simply could have been easy to hide behind a big provider yeah yeah no awesome yeah it's been I will say it's been great to work with you guys we really appreciate you guys as a customer and then obviously the great relationships we we get I mean I've got Gregg's cellphone number you know and in my cell phone you know saved as a contact and it's been it's been really good all across the board so we certainly appreciate that gentlemen I want to thank you very much for for joining us today it's been a pleasure just kind of catching up with everyone and and walking through this this webinar we really appreciate it and if you're listening out there we'd love to support you as a customer one day so give us a Ecology 12 okay take care guys

Document Overview

Provider: G12 Communications

Industry: Health Care (Hospital)

Document Type: Case Study

Title: G12 Communications Evergreen Health Case Study SIP Trunking and Fax over SIP

Symitra’s Overview

Evergreen Health and G12 Communications discuss how moving to SIP Trunking and Fax over SIP significantly reduced operating cost, while streamlining hardware deployments.

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G12 Communications Evergreen Health Case Study SIP Trunking and Fax over SIP