The customer is a higher education organization headquartered in the Midwest, with sites nationwide. The customer had initially worked with CornerStone to source their secondary data connections but reached out when they were notified that they needed to move their headquarters to a new address. Initially, they asked about migrating their internet services. However, we began to dig in and identify the business continuity risks that’d come to light based on their transition plans. We also spent time determining what their needs would be in the coming years. Although the HQ move was imminent (and a significant project by all accounts), we needed to ensure that our proposed solutions would address their growth plans. The customer was scaling their cloud-based classrooms and remote learning offerings, creating a greater need for near-100% uptime, simplified application routing, and raw bandwidth.

Their environment required high availability carrier connections, as their student-facing programs were hosted on-premises and distributed over a private MPLS WAN. Students were given access to the campus WiFi, which would hog the bandwidth and prevent all users from being able to pull down coursework, presentations, and files. Their primary data center was hosted in their HQ location and would need to be moved. Their phone system was an on-prem solution with equipment racked in their data center and was behind several significant revisions. The phones required a major update that coincided with the HQ move, so it made sense to discuss upgrading or migrating to a new system.

The customer encountered serious bandwidth issues at all their sites before our engagement. Still, the HQ move facilitated the conversation to reevaluate their current services. At the time, their sites utilized a hub and spoke MPLS deployment for primary traffic, with the secondary internet connections being used during an outage. Sites relied on the private links for voice, site-to-site traffic, and as a hop out to the internet. They couldn’t easily change traffic routes due to their DMVPN configuration—routing tables would become finicky, and they’d risk downtime in the event of a misconfiguration.

CornerStone designed and proposed multiple carrier solutions that’d exceed the customer’s bandwidth requirements at that time. We also provided a niche solution that allowed for a network design similar to theirs (hybrid MPLS/internet circuits) but substantially improved their flexibility and cloud data access. With our proposal, we scoped several SD-WAN solutions to meet the customers’ needs. We also assisted the customer with running proof of concepts to pick the right solution ultimately. Ultimately, we were green-lit for the proposal to address both current needs and their growth goals.

We utilized diverse Tier 1 carriers, scaled their bandwidth by 6x, deployed a managed and high-availability SD-WAN solution, and saved the customer roughly 10% against their current carrier spend.

Due to the substantial increase in bandwidth across the customer’s sites, the copper that was run from the DEMARC to their telco rooms couldn’t accommodate their needs. CornerStone was engaged to bring low-voltage teams to most of the customers’ sites to run new fiber runs. CornerStone provided project management services on top of this request, coordinating with site contacts and the extension teams to alleviate some of the workload on the customer’s IT staff.

The original cause for this overarching project was the data center move. The customer couldn’t move their equipment into their new facility, as there wasn’t enough space for it, and they required redundant power providers. The new data center also needed to be within a two-hour drive of their HQ office to allow their team members easy access. Lastly, the customer required Smart Hands and asset migration services as they didn’t have enough team members and vehicles to move their data center safely within a reasonable timeframe.

CornerStone was engaged to vet out three different respected providers and help the customer through the negotiation process. The customer moved forward with the provider that was deemed most acceptable and successfully migrated their production environment shortly after. We also assisted with delivering carrier connections to their racks, continuing the access and backbone diversity planning project.

Unfortunately, the data center provider began having communication and support issues post-migration due to restructures and lost headcount. CornerStone was engaged to escalate up the chain of command on behalf of the customer to address the ongoing support issues. We successfully advocated for the customer and have maintained regular cadences to ensure the services provided meet the customer’s expectations.

With the planned HQ move, it was identified that the phone system would also need to be migrated. Their voice infrastructure was racked in their HQ and was aging out. Initially, they intended to upgrade the PBX with their current provider and move to a new data center but were open to our recommendations.

The customer needed phones for staff, faculty, and common areas. They also required integration into Microsoft Teams but weren’t comfortable with Microsoft’s track record of reliability. The tricky aspect came into play when we discovered it needed to integrate into a new cloud-based contact center that leadership had approved but not alerted the IT department.

The customer asked us to review the available solutions on the market and present the one product we saw as the best fit. They worked with their incumbent phone vendor to procure a competing quote and solution.

Ultimately, the customer opted to work with CornerStone and the solution we presented. Where the competitor was proposing a hybrid prem/cloud solution, CornerStone proposed a pure cloud product. Regarding porting coordination, we helped the customer navigate carrier quirks (porting from their SIP provider to two different systems can cause conflicts). We sourced physical handsets and conference phones during a global shortage and shipped them preconfigured to the customers’ sites. We also met the requirements to integrate into Microsoft Teams via Operator Connect. Lastly, we worked with the UCaaS provider to establish a SIP connection between their backbone and the new cloud-based contact center’s backbone, allowing for simplified call transfers and user availability between the systems.

With each project approved, CornerStone acted as a single point of contact for the customer. We were able to provide much-needed support and vendor management services to relieve the customer’s IT team from their massive project load.

When delivering high-availability carrier services, we coordinated the carriers’ installation teams and the customer’s local contacts to ensure smooth site surveys and installations. We then worked with the customer’s local contacts and the low-voltage teams to run extensions from the carrier infrastructure to the customer’s network closets.

When coordinating the HQ data center move, we helped organize the teams on planning calls. Once we began running into issues due to the data center’s restructuring and lost headcount, we escalated to engage the customer and the appropriate support staff. CornerStone was able to pull in resources from the data center’s team to address the lack of support and correct the outstanding issues.

When the phone system migration took off, we were engaged to consult on the DID migration process. At the time, they were porting blocks of DIDs to the UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, resulting in rejection from the losing carrier. We helped the customer navigate the processes and smooth out their migration planning. We also sourced the customer’s physical phones, ensuring they were preprogrammed and shipped to the appropriate local contacts.

Lastly, we were engaged to clean up the losing carrier’s services and billing. The customer was on several legacy SLED accounts, requiring significant effort to terminate. We were able to clean everything up within the customer’s requested timeline and secure some credits.

The project took roughly a year and a half to complete from start to finish. The first six months were dedicated to identifying risks and solutions and making sure everything fell within budget constraints. Even with the hectic crunch of several major projects being run simultaneously, we were able to deliver and provide the customer with the smoothest transition possible.

Post-implementation, we’ve continued biweekly cadence calls to address ad hoc moves, adds, and changes across each project we were engaged in. Overall, it was a fun engagement to be a part of. We provided a series of wins to the resource-constrained IT team while engaging in a challenging game of cat and mouse with the moving delivery dates required by each project.

We can provide the recommendation letter written by the customer at the end of the major projects upon request.