A Thirst For Technology

The agency had several problems. First, it had an aging Centrex phone system that it was tired of paying huge monthly bills for and getting very little in the way of service. After all, as a public agency, every dollar counts and is ultimately paid for by the taxpayer. What's more, few people at the agency had e-mail, and there wasn't any voicemail or a way they could transfer calls easily between staffers. It became crystal clear: New phone and e-mail systems were in order, as was a way to exploit an underutilized piece of fiber linking the agency's remote offices and the ability to connect its water-pumping stations across the desert.

"We needed a secure foundation to install wireless applications as well as to allow us to use video surveillance and support our future applications," says Jesse Shelby, IS manager for the Mojave Water Agency.

Enter Expanets, one of Cisco's largest Voice-over-IP VARs. (In fact, the solution provider recently announced its 500th installation.) Expanets won the agency's bid for the job last fall and brought the new network online in late March. In a nutshell, the network is a combination of various Cisco products, including voice and call management, routers and wireless access points. All this gear is saving the agency more than $6,000 a month in phone bills. How come such a big chunk?

"Local carriers in the California high desert traditionally charge high access fees for standard phone services," says Bob McCook, senior account manager for Expanets' Corona, Calif.-based office. "This is because of the length of the local loops--the distances between customers and the central phone company offices are huge--and because these local phone companies are the only game out there. In the past, the customer really didn't have much of a choice and paid a high price for the most basic phone service."

Getting Started
Starting at the beginning of its search for a solution, it's important to emphasize that the Mojave Water Agency wasn't exactly located at the crossroads of the world. That made it a lot more difficult to get vendors and VARs interested in taking it on as a client. Mohave is about a two-hour, traffic-free drive from Los Angeles.

"Indeed, they were accustomed to bad service from their vendors," McCook says. "But we were willing to make the trips out there and bring the teams ahead of time to see them."

The project was also huge and touched a lot of different disciplines, which made finding the right VAR more difficult. The agency needed a new network infrastructure because its own 10Base-T network was too fragile and couldn't handle the IP telephony requirements. It needed new servers and better fiber networking gear as well.

"They were pushing just 10 megabits over their fiber link, and we brought in the right horsepower on both ends of the link to pump up the bandwidth," McCook says.

In addition, Mojave needed an entire new networking infrastructure to support the new applications. "Most of the time when we install IP telephony, we try to leverage new gear and put in a new infrastructure," McCook says. "Where you get into trouble is when you leave pieces of the old network in and something doesn't work."

Expanets, with its experience in both the voice and data sides of the equation, brought in an experienced team to develop the various facets of the Mojave network. First off, it built a digital phone system for the agency using Cisco's IP phones and AVVID gear. Next, it cut down on the number of circuits that Mohave had to purchase from its local phone company, and brought in PaeTec Communications, an integrated communications provider, to negotiate wholesale rates that were roughly half of what Mojave had been paying. "Now they have one access charge instead of paying for 25 different circuits," McCook says.

Handling the transition from the agency's Centrex to the new IP Cisco phone gear was time-consuming--there is a lot of programming, which can be very lengthy and involved, but done right it represents more of a cultural change for the user than a technical one, McCook explains. As far as the user is concerned, the new phone rings and he or she would just pick it up.

To pull that off, Expanets ended up putting half a dozen people on the project team.

"We had the specialists that just do IP telephony, MS Exchange, bring up new servers and so forth. That is why the team is so large. We took the entire network offline one Friday afternoon and brought the new network online by Monday morning," McCook says. "We had to migrate everything over that weekend, and some of my guys were working through the night to do it. We had a team of folks that lived out there for a week to get it up and running and make sure it was right."

Part of the new applications installed by Expanets were wireless connections to support either mobile users or places where it couldn't pull any wires. "We had some older buildings that didn't have any attics or crawl spaces, so we engineered a Cisco wireless access point for these areas," McCook says. Other mobile workers use Compaq iPAQ PDAs and software that turns them into wireless phones that work across the Mohave network.

Fruits of Expanets' Labor
Today Mojave is sitting pretty. "Their folks are excited about improving their network and improving their customer service," McCook says.

Employees at the agency now have both voicemail and access to Microsoft's Exchange e-mail on a single, Cisco Unified Messaging platform, so when workers aren't at their desks they can call in and have their e-mail read to them via the system.

"This really eases the burden on the office folks and gets them toward a more streamlined process, so that their customer-service people can provide faster responses back to the taxpayers," McCook says. "And everyone who wants access to these services can have it, unlike the past system where few people had them. Voice and e-mail really make a difference."

Mojave is now looking to expand its network, by adding real-time monitoring of its pumping stations and providing streaming video of remote locations. Since 9/11, water agencies have become more sensitive to security needs; many of these pump stations are unmanned, so the agency is looking toward technology to help add a layer of security to those sites in an effort to avoid sending men in trucks across the desert to check on them. Given that the agency delivers to customers over a 500,000 square-mile area, that's a lot of ground to cover.

Expanets again received the bid from Mojave after beating out another Cisco VAR. The difference was the expertise with IP telephony and the fact that Expanets was certified by the California government as a technology provider under the California Multiple Award Schedules (CMAS) program (see www.pd.dgs.ca.gov/cmas).

"The CMAS program has predetermined discount levels, how we are going to behave, what their options are--[it's] very customer-centered as far as the Ts and Cs are concerned," McCook says. "The other VAR didn't have the approval, and didn't have the experience level. We have the big guns to do the job."

And as a result, Mojave has modernized its network, and cut the costs to run its office applications.