The customer is a construction supplies company headquartered in the Midwest. Its sites are spread from the West Coast to Texas and north to Wisconsin and Illinois. The company is owned by a private equity firm with demanding growth goals. The IT director had worked with CornerStone in a previous role and immediately engaged us when he landed his new position. He understood the need for reliable support and his limited ability to manage geographically diverse sites. He also inherited a poorly implemented RingCentral phone system and an aging network infrastructure.

Their European site is mostly self-managed by local operations, but some services overlap.

The customer engaged CornerStone to review internet serviceability to each of their sites (US), focusing on securing savings and improving reliability. We were able to deliver on his request and significantly improve available bandwidth.

The PE firm’s goal of scaling required a simplified networking solution. They had disparate solutions deployed between locations and were tasked with opening new sites. The customer’s goal was to simplify their network while maintaining the ability to migrate to cloud-hosted services in the future. Having a small IT team resulted in reliance on CornerStone to assist with the design and implementation of the solution.

We’d recommended several products, but the customer ultimately decided on Cisco Meraki SASE appliances, switches, and APs. They appreciated the platform’s ease of management and straightforward scalability. The customer also requested ongoing managed services to cover ongoing maintenance and ticketing around the clock, so CornerStone engaged a trusted MSP to provide the additional layer of support.

CornerStone, the MSP, and the customer maintain regular cadence calls to ensure services exceed the customer’s expectations.

When the IT director began in his new role, his staff inundated him with support tickets. Unfortunately, his predecessor and their previous consultants hadn’t completed the rollout of their new RingCentral UCaaS system to all their locations. He’d engaged CornerStone on a consulting basis for ad hoc clean-up, systems integrations, and end-user training sessions, which we were happy to deliver.

We helped the IT director migrate all of his users to the new phone system and configured their new auto attendants and call flows. We also implemented Algo paging adaptors to match the functionality of their old on-premise phone system. Lastly, we decommissioned their old phone system and assisted with equipment removal.

Although we prefer to engage with our customers through their phone vendor reviews, we understand unique situations like this and do our best to fix anything within our power. We take pride in protecting our customers from bad vendors and were able to save this customer’s day. In this situation, the customer’s previous IT leader had also poorly negotiated their rates, resulting in roughly $30,000 of additional annual spending.

As of 2024, we are in the beginning stages of vetting a new UCaaS solution for the customer.