"It came down to one piece of paper that guaranteed [VoIP] wasn"t going to cost us any money," recalls Meewes, the transportation company"s senior vice president and CIO. "When they saw the substantial savings, the meeting only took a few minutes."
Ironically, Meewes hadn"t really emphasized cost savings in his pitch for VoIP, which had been given the green light before that final meeting at GST"s Memphis headquarters earlier this year.
"That piece of paper certainly eliminated any doubts," he says. "As we deploy the new VoIP system, if there are any objections, cost savings is always an item that everyone understands."
Meewes" main argument was that adding voice to the VPN would make for a more reliable and scalable network. "I said it would be a better network that would reduce outages, and we could manage it remotely ourselves," he says. When GST built the data VPN two years ago, the plan was to consider adding voice later.
Still, money talks. GST spent about $710,000 for the new voice hardware and maintenance, and expects to save nearly $800,000 next year in voice costs alone. "The savings were a bonus," Meewes says.
The toughest part of selling VoIP to company execs was explaining that it wasn"t just a new phone system but rather a whole new infrastructure with more features.
"When I evaluate new technologies," Meewes says, "the first requirement is that it must improve our capabilities."
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