Golds Gym Case Study
Gold’s Gym
VoIP
Case Study
By
Vincent Oliver
Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP has in very little time changed the business practices of many companies; increasing their productivity along with saving money and time. VoIP technology delivers communication via voice over a computer network and other packet switching technologies. This could not be more evident when speaking about the 50- plus corporate-owned Gold’s Gyms who took on the challenge of switching from DSL to VoIP. The company was experiencing frequent outages with their DSL (digital subscriber line) network the company needed to look at another option. This is something that Bobby Badugu, the vice-president of IT for Gold’s Gym knew was a meaning for doing a significant upgrade. After exploring various options which included, satellite, frame relay, even a different DSL provider Badugu opted to go with a carrier-provided VoIP (voice over IP) service. This is when all the trouble seemed to rear its nasty head. It is fair to say that the vice-president of IT learned many lesson’s which included using a phased implementation process, establishing clear service level agreements or SLAs, which included penalties; along with conducting a through technology assessment to identify potential issues. The entire rollout was slated to take eight weeks. The data portion of the rollout was complete by mid-November, but only about 20 percent of the voice lines had been ported to the VoIP network. Even with this Badugu remained very bullish and expects benefits of 35 to 40 percent saving in voice and data cost, and was already saving anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 on his conference calls alone. The 50 corporate-owned Gold’s Gym which Badugu is responsible for when it comes to providing network service are in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, Texas and the Washington DC area. Needless to say that network service is vital to the guys due to the fact that they
VoIP
Case Study
By
Vincent Oliver
Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP has in very little time changed the business practices of many companies; increasing their productivity along with saving money and time. VoIP technology delivers communication via voice over a computer network and other packet switching technologies. This could not be more evident when speaking about the 50- plus corporate-owned Gold’s Gyms who took on the challenge of switching from DSL to VoIP. The company was experiencing frequent outages with their DSL (digital subscriber line) network the company needed to look at another option. This is something that Bobby Badugu, the vice-president of IT for Gold’s Gym knew was a meaning for doing a significant upgrade. After exploring various options which included, satellite, frame relay, even a different DSL provider Badugu opted to go with a carrier-provided VoIP (voice over IP) service. This is when all the trouble seemed to rear its nasty head. It is fair to say that the vice-president of IT learned many lesson’s which included using a phased implementation process, establishing clear service level agreements or SLAs, which included penalties; along with conducting a through technology assessment to identify potential issues. The entire rollout was slated to take eight weeks. The data portion of the rollout was complete by mid-November, but only about 20 percent of the voice lines had been ported to the VoIP network. Even with this Badugu remained very bullish and expects benefits of 35 to 40 percent saving in voice and data cost, and was already saving anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 on his conference calls alone. The 50 corporate-owned Gold’s Gym which Badugu is responsible for when it comes to providing network service are in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, Texas and the Washington DC area. Needless to say that network service is vital to the guys due to the fact that they