The company's telephony including voice

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, they travel over an IP data network.

"SIP trunking connects existing PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) telephone equipment to the PSTN directly over an IP-based data link just as IP-VPN or Ethernet as opposed to ISDN, which is legacy TDM innovation," 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.

The cost benefits

"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.

Reduction in the amount of revenue going to them

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

"Individual locations are no longer treated as separate entities and are effectively brought at the same time through a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)-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.

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