Success Stories

Callahan Studios

Industry: Architecture
Founded: 1987
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Telephone System: Hosted Cisco Unified Messaging
Network: MS Exchange
Cisco Solution: Cisco Unified Messaging

Small Firm Leverages Cisco Unified Communications and Wireless Technology for Nationwide Solution.

Callahan Studios is a family of companies offering architectural and construction management services and strategic planning for churches around the country. In 1999, company management was addressing its legacy voicemail system, which was not Y2K compliant. What started as a Y2K voicemail project evolved into a first-of-its-kind unified communications solution in the Indianapolis area.

Small Firm Looks for Holistic Approach to Communication

When it became clear that Callahan Studios’ legacy voicemail system was not going to make the Y2K cut, Ron Ewing, Callahan’s vice president of Operations outlined the firm’s business principles, looking for ways to use technology to better communicate and conduct daily business routines. The company has main headquarters in a warehouse-style building in Indianapolis, Indiana. It needed communication for the construction sites it manages throughout the country, as well as a way to link its mobile workers and those working from home. Callahan’s president hooked Ewing up with Doug Sauer, president, of Enterprise Unified Solutions (eUS), a Cisco Premier Certified Channel Partner.  After learning about Callahan’s business requirements and its voicemail predicament, Doug  recommended a unified communication system that addressed the immediate voicemail concerns and expanded on it by offering unified IP Telephony and unified messaging, (fax, voice mail and email). The solution is delivered over the eUS broadband network, (including the eUS Metropolitan broadband wireless backbone) which would reach out
to all the mobile Callahan sites across the country.

The solution recommended by eUS bridges the legacy telephone company network within the Callahan pure IP Telephony enterprise. eUS provides the service across a broadband network with IP telephony and a common IP infrastructure end-to-end. It allows users to send, receive, and manage messages from any access device, regardless of message type. So users can, for instance, listen to email messages from the phone, get voice messages through their PC, and forward fax messages to other email users. The unified communication product
is a suite of eUS applications, offering IP telephony and unified messaging (voice mail over IP, fax mail over IP and email). Along with the communications benefits it provides, unified communications also saves costs on long distance charges.

“When we engineered this project in the fall of 1999, it was difficult to deliver a quality of service across DSL or other wired solutions,” said Sauer. In order to meet the needs of Callahan’s mobile workforce, eUS recommended delivering the unified solution over a wireless backbone owned and maintained by eUS. Sauer calls the Callahan implementation a ‘sizzling solution’ on broadband wireless, but says it was really chosen for its functionality.
It would provide Callahan, with its network of employees at headquarters, home offices, and remote construction sites across the nation, with one common system and one common way of communicating.

Callahan Studios could have addressed just its voicemail issue, because other than the Y2K issue it worked fine. Instead, it reviewed its whole communications infrastructure. “What Doug was proposing with unified communications and the wireless backbone—it was clear that’s where the industry is going,” said Ewing. “We
decided to make the investment in improving overall company communications.”

Sauer is a big believer in IP-based technology, comparing it to the digital revolution that took place in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “This is a ‘disruptive technology’ that I believe will eventually take over every business and all the networks around the world like digital technology did years ago,” said Sauer. “A common, IP