FoodWorks moves from web conferencing to UC

Exorbitant fees for third-party web conferencing led Foodworks to deploying collaborative unified communications across its business.

We were having issues where we were spending large amounts of money with a third party on audio conferencing," Network manager of the independent supermarket group, Francis McPhail, said. “We did an ROI calculation and decided to invest further into the technology that we already had on site.”

The next step for FoodWorks was an upgrade to ShoreTel 12 in the hopes the system would improve telephony based communication across the business.

Read more about unified communications.

“We took the rollout fairly slowly, and we rolled in to our Melbourne site then our Brisbane site and it was an overnight rollover,” he said. “It was very simple and pretty well without any hiccups.”

With an initial assessment of an ROI being achieved in two and a half years, McPhail said this estimate has since been revised down to two years.

“We’ve saved a significant amount of funds,” he said. “We were spending several thousands of dollars a month on video conferencing with Telstra and it’s really simplified that.”

Since the rollout, McPhail said FoodWorks has been trialling the use of video conferencing; a technology trend that Ovum predicts will soar in the next year.

“We’ve been investing [in] and trialling video conferencing,” he said. “We’re slowly going through, taking that step by step because we want to include the ability for external third parties to access the system too.”

Follow Lisa Banks on Twitter: @CapricaStar

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAu

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