Borland Canada's sales force is always on the move - so much so that many of the Toronto based software company's 30 full-time salespeople and 30 contractors across Canada don't even have a physical office to lay down their laptop. While the freedom to move around has always been beneficial for the individual sales reps, it sometimes proved difficult to feel part of one big team when everyone was scattered in different places.

Trying to track people down on their cellular phones wasn't always easy. It was awkward to sift through voice mail messages or set up conference calls while on the road, and it was expensive to make long-distance calls. So when Borland moved its offices from Markham, Ont., to Toronto in late 2003, finding a more efficient and cost-effective way to build a virtual team became top priority.

Discovering a completely new option
"We're constantly looking to improve our operations so we can expand our market presence and be more interactive with our customers," says Christopher Corey, president and general manager of Borland Canada. "Given that we had a large remote team serving the entire country, we felt it crucial to cut off that remoteness and bring us together as a group."

At first, there seemed to be but two options: continue using what Corey calls its existing "antiquated" PBX system with limited features, or go completely wireless by combining wireless air cards with cellular phones to accommodate the remote team. Already about one-quarter of the Borland sales team was using TELUS Mobility cellular phones and some of the technical folk were using TELUS Mobility wireless air cards to connect their laptops to the Internet, so it made sense to consult with TELUS about creating a virtual team using wireless technology.

It was in talks with TELUS about going wireless that Borland first learned about TELUS's IP-One carrier-grade hosted and managed Internet Protocol (IP) telephony service. Says Matthew Wise, manager of technical services at Borland Canada: "The instant we heard about IP-One, we knew it would fit our needs perfectly. It erased the line between having a remote phone and a handset by having one single phone number for both."

TELUS IP-One uses TELUS' Next Generation Network (NGN) - a carrier-class, single IP-based network -to route calls and data, providing business customers with a full suite of IP-based advanced application services and the ability to integrate voice mail, e-mail, data and images via a highly intuitive online Web portal hosted and managed by TELUS.

Speed and flexibility
Today at Borland Canada, there's now just one number for the entire nationwide sales team, with each rep having a simple extension number to create a feeling of unity. With IP-One's all-important Find Me Follow Me feature, sales reps can be in the office, at home or on the road, but their calls follow them wherever they go. That's good news for customers and suppliers because they only need to know one phone number to reach their sales reps.

It's also good for Borland's internal use. Wise, for example, configures two Find Me Follow Me numbers every weekday between 8:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. so his colleagues can find him easily. If somebody phones his office and he's not there, IP-One automatically routes the call to his cell phone. If Wise doesn't answer that line either, his phone rings in the server room. The caller has just one number to remember and Wise doesn't miss any calls. "It makes the entire team easier to access and much more responsive to each other and to Borland's customers and suppliers," says Corey.

IP-One also lets Borland sales reps easily manage features from their TELUS cellular phones or from the TELUS portal on the Internet. They can manage call forwarding and contact lists, access voice mail as they would e-mail by clicking on a specific message, or conduct ad-hoc multi-party conference calls by selecting contact names from a directory and adding them to a "Meet Me" Window on the TELUS portal.

"You can actually control your whole telephone experience via the Web site if you want to," says Wise. "You can view your call logs - missed calls, received calls, dialed-out calls. You can place calls from the Web portal. You can initiate conference calls and bring other people in, both people in the phone system and people who you've configured in your personal directory through the portal. I can listen to my voice mail through the portal, so I can be anywhere in the world and as long as I can get to a computer I can pick up and manage my messages, whether I'm in Jamaica or at a client."

Moving to IP-One has also slashed Borland's costs by 40 per cent. Before they made the switch, says Wise, Borland was using a standard PBX system as well as T1 lines for Internet connectivity to run the corporate local-area network and the public Web site. These were two separate accounts with two different support models and two different leasing schedules and costs were climbing. By moving to IP-One, TELUS provides the Internet connectivity for all three pieces of the puzzle: the phone system, the corporate LAN and the Web site. Everything is rolled under one umbrella and there's still the same amount of bandwidth as before, says Wise.

Simple and easy
Long distance costs have also been cut dramatically, though Wise has yet to calculate the exact savings. In addition to cost savings, Borland is keen to implement the new components of IP-One as TELUS rolls them out.

Response to Borland's IP-One solution has been extremely positive. It took just a few visits for TELUS to get IP-One up and running, and it went live the day employees moved into the new office.

As with any project, Corey urges others to understand their needs and objectives before looking to unite a remote team using a hosted and managed IP telephony system like IP-One. "I stay awake at night worrying about costs increasing more rapidly than revenue and fixed costs during revenue fluctuations, so I make it my business to continually strive to improve our customer experience while keeping delivery costs in check," says Corey. "IP-One has given me peace of mind because we're being much more efficient in how we work."