Pavestone has manufactured segmental concrete products for the commercial, residential, contractor, industrial, and retail consumer markets since 1980. Thanks to its high-quality products and sound business strategy, Pavestone has grown steadily over the years and currently runs over 20 regional manufacturing locations and distributes its products to over 40 states.

To interconnect the company’s locations and to cut its operational costs, Pavestone decided to deploy an IP telephony system to 12 of its existing sites (including its headquarters in Dallas, TX).

Pavestone chose Cisco’s state of the art IP telephony system because

• The technology was ready to grow with Pavestone by allowing it to add more sites to the system in the future.
• It came with the option of significantly extending the out-of-the-box feature set with solutions provided by 3rd party developer partners – such as 2Ring.
• It was user-friendly enough to let internal IT staff manage most of the day-to-day operational tasks on its own.

Once Cisco IP Telephony was selected, the analysis of Pavestone’s requirements, led by a Cisco Gold Partner, General Datatech (GDT), revealed the need to deploy a 3rd party product to cover Pavestone’s requirements for a public announcement (PA) and texting service.

GDT recommended 2Ring IPPS (IP Phone Services), a modular platform that allows companies to choose from a rich set of additional services to extend the out-of-the-box feature set offered by Cisco IP Telephony.

After a hands-on session in GDT’s showroom, Pavestone decided to purchase sets of Cisco IP Phones 7962 and 7942, and regarding 2Ring IPPS, to start with three modules: Base, Messaging, and Synchronization.

Since IPPS doesn’t require a stand-alone server, Pavestone chose to deploy IPPS on a VMWare virtual machine with MS Windows Server 2008R2, while the IPPS database is now part of one of Pavestone’s existing MS SQL Server.

For the 1st phase of the project, having the paging and texting services deployed as soon as possible, it was decided to synchronize IPPS with the user list on Cisco Unified Communications Manager v8.5 once a day using 2Ring IPPS’ Synchronization Module. This ensured that the initial deployment of IPPS was very fast and smooth and didn’t cause a minute of interrupted telephony service.

In the 2nd phase of the project, 2Ring IPPS will be synchronized with Pavestone’s internal information system where all of the company’s contacts (including cell phone numbers of its employees and all contact information for its customers, suppliers, and other partners) are stored. This will ensure that all contacts are available directly on Cisco IP Phones. On top of that, 2Ring IPPS can be configured in the future to send text messages to external numbers as well, e.g. to employees’ cell phones.

Utilizing existing infrastructure (Cisco IP Telephony), and thus without adding any additional wiring, Pavestone’s employees are now able to

• Deliver a public announcement message in the following ways:
• Pushing a speed dial button on a Cisco IP Phone to deliver a message to one pre-selected group of Cisco IP Phones.
• Finding a target group, either directly on the Cisco IP Phone or using IPPS’ web user interface that is part of the company’s Intranet, to deliver a public announcement message to any existing group of Cisco IP Phones.
• Text to another Cisco IP Phone or to an existing group of Cisco IP Phones.
• Enhance Cisco IP Phones with additional contacts. They can create an unlimited number of personal directories/address books, sync these with other contact data stores, such as MS Outlook/Gmail/Facebook, secure them with a PIN code, and then even share them with selected coworkers.
• Benefit from 2Ring IntelliSearch, which speeds up all contact searches conducted directly on the phone in such a way that hitting a phone key once immediately associates the directory search with all the letters under the key. All that is left is to pick up the receiver and the number will be dialed.

Paul Kuper, UC Product Specialist at General Datatech, concludes, “Pavestone decided on 2Ring IPPS because it addressed their messaging needs at an affordable cost and it provides many additional features that they will definitely utilize in the future.”