NASBA

Dalcon uses the open-source PBX software, Asterisk, to provide a unique telephony solution for NASBA – at an unbeatable cost!

The NASBA (National Association of State Boards of Accountancy) serves as a forum for the boards of accountancy of 55 states and US Territories.

As primary support provider for these boards across 55 States and US Territories, as well as for thousands of individuals registering for the CPA Examination at any given time, NASBA’s system runs an average of 5,500-plus calls per day.

Need to Integrate Telephones and Information Technology Drives Search for Telephony Solution

Given his organization’s high-volume and highly interactive environment NASBA Chief Technology Officer, Ed Barnicott, made tightening the integration between his telecommunications and IT systems a top priority.

“Our group was challenged to engineer a platform for Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and a robust Integrated Voice Response (IVR) platform,” he says. “Each caller’s account needed to be automatically brought up on our customer service representative’s (CSR) monitor as soon as we received the call.”

Enabling that functionality on the organization’s 10 year-old proprietary phone system was possible, according to Barnicott, but extremely expensive. “It was already costing us an inordinate amount of money just to support and maintain the system, and we would have had to spend significantly more to get the CTI functionality we needed,” he says.

Flexibility, Functionality, Service

NASBA solicited proposals from a number of phone system providers, including its incumbent provider, and received quotes ranging from over $180,000, for upgrading the existing switch, to well over $500,000 for a new, comprehensive phone system.  The Dalcon solution cost was well below even the upgrade option and delivered a customized solution including a complete phone system replacement with full IP telephony.

Though the phone system’s cost was an important consideration, Barnicott placed more emphasis on the flexibility and functionality the system could deliver, as well as its ability to support NASBA’s future growth – anticipated to expand to 600 phones (up from its current 240).

Given NASBA’s technical orientation, Barnicott’s believed his expectations could best be met by a software-based system. After a yearlong evaluation process NASBA selected an Asterisk-based system from Dalcon in October 2008.

According to Barnicott, it was Dalcon’s business model that set it apart.  “Dalcon had an insight into the modern telephony market that I found lacking in the other providers,” he says. “Several of the companies that pitched us were traditional switch companies that had moved to VoIP. They didn’t understand that telephony is a software product, with commodity hardware. Dalcon recognized that the only way to differentiate is through functionality, flexibility and service, and they do a terrific job on that.”

Open Standards: Lower costs, Increased Flexibility

Dalcon’s use of the open standards components throughout its solution is evidence of his company’s focus on flexibility, says David Condra, President of Dalcon. “NASBA is an open source shop and they were looking for flexibility from their provider,” he says. “Rather than a hard-wired, inflexible traditional PBX, we delivered software running on industry-standard computer and network hardware. We call it ‘investment protection’. With an open standard model, NASBA bought a system of interchangeable parts, where each component is individually upgradable. There’s no danger of the whole system going obsolete.” Dalcon builds its solutions using industry standard hardware such as Dell servers and Polycom IP phones, and open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Asterisk—the dominant, open source PBX software, and adds its own DCM software to provide easy configuration and administration by the user.

Dalcon and NASBA developed a comprehensive implementation process, the first and most critical step of which was for Dalcon to develop the custom code necessary to enable IVR integration.

“We had some very particular needs and aggressive CTI requirements in our call centers,” says Barnicott. “Dalcon developed functionality that would allow us to access an in-progress call, find the specific records in our database pertaining to that caller and immediately display the call on our CSR’s screen. Being the solution developer, Dalcon, of course, had access to their root code, which made the customization process so much easier and enabled them to deliver what we needed at a much lower investment than other providers, who were reselling other solutions and were twice or even 3-times the cost.”

Over the next several months, Dalcon worked with NASBA IT staff, configuring and testing the system and working through a range of technical details.  “We had a very deliberate and incremental implementation plan detailed down to the day and to every aspect of the system,” says Dalcon’s Condra. “We emphasized communication throughout, because NASBA is a big, technically oriented organization, with a lot of parts and pieces.”

Easy-to-Use, Feature-Rich

“We signed off on the Dalcon system four months ago and I haven’t given a lot of thought to it since,” says Barnicott. “And when I say I haven’t thought about it, that’s the biggest compliment I can give.”

In addition to its dependability, the Dalcon system has impressed Barnicott for its range of features – notably the Follow-Me and Voicemail-to-Email capabilities – and its ease-of-use. “We’re totally refurbishing on one of our floors, which disrupts everything and everbody. People are constantly moving from desk to desk, and at one point we had 20 people working out of our conference room,” he says. “With our old system, moving people’s phone lines around would have been a technical and logistical nightmare, but with a software-based solution, like Dalcon, you just take your phone and plug it into any data network jack at the new location and you’re ready to go.”

Barnicott points out that NASBA runs its Dalcon system on a single Dell server, which validates his belief that scaling the Dalcon system to meet NASBA’s future demands can be done with minimal cost and downtime. “Expanding to 600 phones is simply a matter of adding an off-the-shelf Dell server, any lines required and the additional licenses for that box,” he says. “So for literally a fraction of the cost of a traditional, proprietary phone system, we’ve got a world-class, open, software-based system that will manage all our present and future requirements and can do it without even breathing hard.”