In This Study

Understanding the importance of high performance communications Fulfilling clear business requirements Going with convergence Making important decisions

ith corporate roots extending back nearly 150 years, AGL Resources (AGLR) has grown from a pioneering gas light provider in downtown Atlanta to become one of the largest natural gas distributors in the United States. AGL Resources has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s fastest growing and most efficiently run utility companies.

High Performance Communications: Essential at AGL Resources

A highly disciplined firm, AGLR sees innovation technology and cost-effective business processes as fundamental enablers for business growth. Using these tools, the management team at AGL Resources has maintained a tight focus on growing shareholder value.

With growth of net income being a key measure of corporate success, AGL Resources certainly has reason to celebrate — in the face of a less than optimum economy, most recent year core earnings increased more than 22 percent on sales exceeding $860 million.

If you asked AGL Resources to identify the key corporate assets that directly impact the bottom line, business communications would be prominent on their short list. As manager of AGLR’s voice communications, Louis Acuna is responsible for making sure the impact is a positive one.

“AGL Resources is very focused on the processes that are critical to the success of the business. Our communications infrastructure is viewed as one of AGLR’s strategic assets and essential to revenue realization.”

For AGLR, keeping a tight focus on satisfying customers is a fundamental business imperative, and communications capabilities are central to fulfilling that mandate. From an IT perspective, AGLR has a broad view of their customers; they range from internal employees to AGLR’s external stakeholders — residential customers, commercial accounts, state regulators, and business partners. Their ability to conduct business directly depends on the integrity of AGLR’s communications network.

As an energy utility, AGLR also has serious public safety responsibilities. With natural gas distribution being one of AGL Resources’ core businesses, there is an absolute need for an always available communications network. When a gas line is damaged by a contractor or homeowner, their communications network plays a vital role in their ability to rapidly respond. In a business like this, there is no room for network downtime.

AGLR’s Business Requirements

AGL Resources has 34 locations throughout the Southeast, with more than 2,000 end users. Mr. Acuna explains that “As is often the case with businesses that engage in acquisition, the expansion of our business brought with it some site-to-site variability in our communications networks.”

The lack of standardization presented some network management challenges, but far more apparent to the end users was the lack of consistent feature functionality across the different locations. Architecturally, their communications capabilities were still based on separate voice and data networks, and they weren’t sure that was the best forward-looking approach.

AGLR had been following the evolution of IP converged platforms and saw that there appeared to be some substantive benefits to adopting an integrated infrastructure. Since one of their corporate thrusts is to leverage new technology to improve the efficiency of the business, Mr. Acuna and his team knew that AGLR leadership would be very interested in their findings.

The business needs were actually quite straightforward and all rotated around the importance of communications in supporting collaboration and rapid decision-making. Fundamentally, it is all about empowerment — using the communications network to empower all associates with information and reinforce a common sense of purpose.

Going with Convergence

In keeping with AGLR’s focus on tight business processes, Mr. Acuna and the IT team made sure the project recommendations were well supported.

Before making a final decision on staying with traditional voice architecture or making the shift to convergence, Mr. Acuna and his team did considerable research. They talked with enterprises using a VoIP solution, and they issued a competitive bid that resulted in several submissions.

Armed with their research and the insights from other enterprises, they methodically evaluated the competitive options. When all was said and done, they decided on a total VoIP solution from Avaya — hardware, software, and full life-cycle services support.

At the heart of their new network is an S8700 Media Server running Avaya MultiVantage Communications Applications. The remote locations are running IP-enabled DEFINITY SI or Prologix voice servers. Each server is fully networked, enabling all employees to reach each other via 5-digit dialing.

A general theme of this new technology is doing more for less. The new platform allows AGLR to put all interoffice voice and data traffic on the wide area network (WAN) over common facilities. Running IP trunking to support the network connection needs of their 34 sites — including the new headquarters — significantly reduces facility and transport costs. As AGLR management drives these expenses out of their IT budget, they’re able to reinvest those savings on other business technology initiatives.

For voice messaging, AGLR has three networked Avaya INTUITY AUDIX systems that provide seamless voicemail across all locations. They also have a multimedia application — Avaya Message Manager — so that all associates can manage their voicemail and e-mail in the same mailbox.

For AGLR’s call centers, they’re using Avaya’s IP Agent application. This allows AGLR to deploy virtual call center agents in any of its locations, but with the same full functionality as the main center. The external customers still dial the same reach number, and the actual location of the agent is completely transparent to the caller.

The AGLR IT team also provided their executives with the Avaya EC-500 extension to cellular feature, which enables “follow me” functionality so they can give out a single number that rings on their office and cell phones for maximum reachability. On the internal IT side of things, they’ll be deploying the Avaya VisAbility network management suite, which enables them to bring their network planning and reporting efforts to a new level.

Mr. Acuna adds, “If we choose to, the Avaya S8700 gives us the flexibility to host a new site directly from headquarters, speeding up the turning-up of the new location and eliminating the cost of a local server.”

He concludes, “Capacity for growth, rich features and applications, cost-effectiveness — this Avaya solution really positions us well for the future.”

Decision Factors

In the final analysis, there were several key factors behind AGLR’s decision to go Avaya, as described in the following sections.