Sprint Calls on Microsoft Lync

CIO — Sprint may nevertheless be a phone company, however you won't see many desk phones in house these days. As a matter of fact, Sprint's IT group has spent the last few years eliminating its PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) systems in favor of headsets plugged into laptops.

The number 3 wireless carrier in the U.S.

The number 3 wireless carrier in the U.S., based in Overland Park, Kan., has been dabbling with UC since 2007, when it implemented Microsoft's OCS for basic features just as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and instant messaging.

In the past year, Sprint has transitioned to Lync, Microsoft's rebranded version of OCS. The general feature set of corporate IM, audio/video conferencing and VoIP is in the main the same between Lync and OCS. But, Lync does include Live Meeting Web conferencing as then as new features just as e911, which indicates the location of a person making an emergency call, and Skill Search, which lets you find people with specific expertise.

The lure of Lync for Sprint

The lure of Lync for Sprint and other businesses is that it is capable of augmenting or replacing traditional PBX and conferencing systems, thereby saving companies money on hardware, licensing costs and, in Sprint's case, real estate, says Joe Hamblin, Sprint's Unified Communications and Collaboration Manager.

"Freeing users from their physical phones allowed Sprint to save money by shutting down offices in some of their smaller locations," says Hamblin. "We had some big offices that were only housing 30 people. We could shut that down and save money on rent, power and electricity."

"We have 40,000 employees using Lync," says Hamblin. "Most of them are 'knowledge workers' who use Lync for all communications and collaboration from anywhere they choose to work. Executives on the whole have PBX phones and Lync, nevertheless more and more are using Lync."

Traditional Microsoft shop

Sprint is a traditional Microsoft shop, nevertheless the road to OCS, and at the time Lync, was not short. Back in 2005, Sprint was using Nortel PBX systems, yet was eager to move to a UC platform.

But the implementation of OCS, and the in the end Lync, came afterwards five failed funding requests to displace its existing PBX infrastructure with VoIP. All the VoIP market leaders that Sprint evaluated in 2006/2007 had the same problems: The ROI payback time period was five years; a support team was required to operate a siloed voice infrastructure; and the products failed to integrate all the features Sprint wanted just as voice, video, email, Web conferencing and document-sharing.

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