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Velux Case Study

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Highlights at a glance

  • Velux moves to Microsoft Teams with GTT global SIP Trunking service

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VELUX logo

For almost 80 years, the VELUX Group has created better indoor environments all over the world.

Known for its selection of roof windows and modular skylights, the VELUX Group has sales and manufacturing operations in more than 40 countries and has 11,500 employees worldwide.

11500+

Worldwide employees

100+

Locations worldwide

VELUX expects the whole project to save over 1 million euros thanks to reducing its voice providers and lowering its hardware spend, as well as through the resulting reduction in time spent on maintenance and management over the next four to five years.

VELUX runs an extensive business that relies on seamless communication and collaboration among its 100 locations around the world. Ensuring it has high-quality communication infrastructure is critical for the company, as it has built a reputation for providing excellent customer care from its 25 international contact centers.

VELUX had used Microsoft Skype for Business for many years, including its integrated telephony. Because the Skype platform looks set to move to end support in the coming years, VELUX began the migration to Microsoft Teams. The company needed to enable telephony from the Teams app to ensure a full unified communications capability for its staff and customer service teams. This move also future-proofed its telephony system because it replaced the legacy ISDN-based telephony across its footprint with VoIP. ISDN technology is in the process of being switched off by telecom operators in many countries around the world. VELUX chose GTT to help create a flexible and efficient solution, leveraging GTT’s global SIP Trunking services for inbound and outbound voice calling across its entire estate.

The challenge

To run its corporate telephony solution, VELUX operated over 60 local voice gateways worldwide based on ISDN technology. While this ensured VELUX had a resilient setup, it made vendor management very complex, as the company had to manage between 25 and 30 different vendors. It was a slow process to activate user or system changes, and it was relatively CAPEX-intensive, neither of which matched VELUX’s agile and dynamic business vision.

Consolidating voice providers

Going from 30 to 1

Complex vendor management

Replaced over 60 of its own local gateways with six Global Session Border Controllers hosted in three different regions in the Microsoft Azure cloud

The most
inspiring feature

The company needed to enable telephony from the Teams app to ensure a full unified communications capability for its staff and customer service teams.

“We looked closely at the cost and business case for achieving our goal of moving everything to the cloud. We found that using Microsoft Teams and working with GTT to enable voice for our new, completely cloud-based solution would bring us a great many benefits.”

VELUX

The solution

Improving global collaboration and productivity

GTT’s SIP Trunking service with its extensive global reach enables a fast and easy integration of VELUX critical business communication over Microsoft Teams to improve global collaboration and productivity. GTT delivers local telephone numbers to VELUX users across the globe. Outbound calling costs can be easily managed with the simple pricing structure, and overall spend is reduced, as site-to-site calling is free of charge with GTT.

VELUX took advantage of the ability to run GTT SIP Trunks in parallel with its existing services. This enabled VELUX to start building out its new SIP Trunk and run a pilot.

Learning from and documenting its experiences, VELUX was able to apply them in an agile way to its comprehensive global user audit and match exact requirements across its offices.

VELUX has moved to a new setup with six softwarebased Session Border Controllers in three Microsoft Azure cloud hubs in North America, Europe and Asia. Each SBC is delivered with a fully resilient SIP Trunk service from GTT.

In addition, GTT delivers Dedicated Internet Access to a dozen VELUX sites across Europe, North America and Australia.

“We can now bring a new office online in just three to four weeks, because everything comes from one provider, GTT. Time is money, so the faster we can have a new office running, the better.”

VELUX

The benefits

The GTT SIP Trunking solution enabled VELUX to merge its global telephony platform with the cloud, simplify the management of its voice network worldwide with a single provider and reduce costs, and migrate to a more flexible and scalable infrastructure that ensures new business locations can easily be brought on board.

“Adopting a more cloud-first mindset and finding the right partner for voice in GTT has made a big difference to our business,” said Laursen. “Through this project, we expect to save around 540,000 euros in hardware and around 720,000 euros in estimated cost of man-hours for maintenance and management over the next four to five years. We’ve done this by replacing over 60 local gateways with just six SBCs in the Azure cloud, as well as consolidating around 25 to 30 different voice providers down to only working with GTT for globally integrated SIP Trunking to our Microsoft Teams.”

The new service also brings many operational benefits to the VELUX IT team. Laursen said, “Moving to a single provider and into the cloud has been a positive thing for our team. From an operational point of view, our newcloud-based architecture and consolidation with GTT as our single voice supplier saves us time and money on maintenance, upgrades, troubleshooting and more. It also means we’ve been able to remove a lot of complexity and dependencies from the infrastructure. The operational gains we achieve give us better performance and fewer tickets, which is a huge win for us.”

VELUX has also increased its business agility by reaping the benefits of a cloud-based and highly virtualized setup. Laursen said here, “Integrating telephony through Microsoft Teams and the cloud is complex. GTT made the integration and transition smooth and always supports our needs with agility. Working with GTT, the delivery of new telephone numbers and services for our office locations has really changed.”

Laursen explained, “For example, it used to take quite a while to set up a new office because we would have to coordinate different suppliers for both the installation of MPLS lines for our wide area network as well as ISDN lines for our telephony. Now, we can set up an office using internet lines managed with SD-WAN and run our telephony over that same internet through our GTT SIP Trunk groups to our Microsoft Teams enabled instance.”

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