With a sustained annual revenue growth rate of 12 percent and an annual net worth growth of almost 28 percent over the past five years, it would be easy to think that Grupo JMalucelli was firing on all cylinders operationally. Yet the Brazilian company, which generates more than $1 billion in revenue and spans a broad range of industries including construction, finance and telecommunications, was having trouble with its unified communications infrastructure.
“We had used IP phones from a very well-known manufacturer but even after we had upgraded all of our components to the very latest models, we still had difficulties,” noted JMalucelli IT infrastructure coordinator Gerson Almeida in an Alcatel-Lucent case study. “In addition to being unreliable, the hardware was very inflexible, had poor functionality and was very expensive to maintain. We decided to look for a new vendor.”
That led JMalucelli to Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert), where it found an IP telephony solution with a flexible architecture that achieved its telephony objectives: lower cost of ownership, expansion capabilities, redundancy, security, centralized management, and the ability to implement a robust unified communications (UC) environment.
Burned in the past by IP telephony, initially JMalucell started with equipment on loan from Alcatel-Lucent. But that didn’t last long.
“The equipment we used for verification was originally loaned to us, but we liked it so much that we ended up keeping it,” enthused JMalucelli IT manager Oscar Filho in the case study.
The portfolio of equipment used by JMalucelli, which is constantly expanding, includes:
- Several thousand Alcatel-Lucent IP Touch phones
- Alcatel-Lucent 300 and 400 DECT (News - Alert) Handsets
- Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise Communication Servers
- Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6250/6400/6850 switches
- Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 8450 Fax Software
- Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX RECORD
- Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 4760 Network Management Syste
- Alcatel-Lucent Session Border Controllers
“The benefits from the solution are various, including increased capability and redundancy, high security and centralized management, ease of operation, reduced telephone cost,” said Filho in a short video about the move. “More important, it increased our productivity.”
Almeida added, “Our environment is extremely dynamic and this means it is important that any equipment we use is flexible and agile enough to meet the requirements of the business.”
He said the flexible architecture of the Alcatel-Lucent offering has allowed the equipment to accommodate all the changes the company wanted to make, in addition to a few new capabilities.
“We now have capabilities that we’ve never had before, such as electronic secretaries and high-performance fax servers,” said Almeida in the case study.
The company, with about 3,000 employees, has seen a significant drop in charges since it began working with the new system. IP telephony effectively has allowed all calls from the company to be treated as local.
This allows it to follow one of the major trends large enterprises around the world are embracing which is one of the major benefits of unified communications when executed properly on a modern IP telephony platform, “Act global but feel local.”
