Clever title, isn’t it? But it’s true – Mavidea saved at least $5500 during the “Snowpacolypse” snow event last week.
For those of you not in central Illinois, I’m sure you heard about the blizzard that tore through the area. Bloomington was luckily spared most of it – we only got 12-13 inches of snow. Don’t get me wrong – 12 inches brought everything here to a dead stop, but at least we didn’t get the 20 inches my mother-in-law got in the west suburbs of Chicago.
The great news is that with all of our modern news sources (my favorite weather site is still www.wunderground.com) , we all knew it was coming, and took steps to be ready for it. Snow shovels, bags of salt, bread, milk, and toilet paper were reported to be flying off of store shelves.
Mavidea prepared a different way – we sent telephones home with our employees.
We determined a long time ago that Mavidea is not bound by location. Our staff needs 2 things in order to service customers – telephones and access to our business applications.
Telephones
Mavidea has an Intertel 5000 phone system (just a FYI that Intertel was acquired by Mitel, so it’s a Mitel 5000 now). It is an IP based phone system, which means that the phone handsets and base station talk on the same data network as the computers do. For starters it makes it a lot simpler moving users and desks inside our office, because you can plug a handset or a computer into any data jack and they will connect back to the appropriate server or phone base station. Easy as pie.
But we also bought the add-on that allows the handsets to “phone home” (pun intended ) from outside our network. It worked perfectly last week – our staff packed up their handsets, took them home, and simply plugged them in to their home Internet connection. The handset surfed across the public Internet, and connected to our phone base station. When I was at home, I was still extension 103 and calls routed in to me. When people called in and hit option 3 for support, it still rang through to David, Tony, Andrew, Chris, Jamison, and Jamie, following the exact same rules as if they were sitting at their desks.
This isn’t new technology, but as with everything else, the prices have come down significantly. Faster and faster DSL / Cable modem speeds make it easier to do than ever. There are still some technical gotchas that have to be worked out – we still run into occasional snafus using the public Internet – but generally as long as the base station has enough bandwidth to handle incoming signals it’s not too difficult to do any more.
Business Application access.
Again, with a little bit of planning ahead, access to the Mavidea network isn’t very complicated to use. It requires a 2 step process:
- Establishing a secure connection to the Mavidea offices via VPN. (I talked about VPNs to keep mobile travelers safe in my Using Public WIFI Hotspots Securely post . Employees use the same username /password combination as when logging in to their desks, which makes it easier on them to remember (but they MUST have strong passwords!)
- Accessing the business applications by logging in to their desktop or by connecting to a Remote Desktop Services Server (formerly called Terminal Server).
The VPN part is going to be pretty easy for most existing Mavidea customers. Mavidea has standardized on SonicWALL firewalls (technically Unified Threat Management Gateways) to protect customer networks from both internal and external problems. Those same SonicWALLs have Clean VPN capabilities built in to them that will scale up to 10-15 users (depending on the size SonicWALL unit in place). If you have more than 10 users, it’s pretty good idea to use a SonicWALL VPN Concentrator. Then we can let the firewall be a firewall and the VPN Concentrator handle VPNs. Mavidea’s VPN Concentrator is good for 20 users at once. Connecting to our network usually takes about 15 seconds.
Once they are connected, users get to their data by either taking control of their desktop (if they have one – a lot now have thin clients) or by connecting to our Remote Desktop Services system. Either approach has the exact same effect – employees login in with their username and password and work using all of our applications just like they were sitting at their desks. All of the processing is done on the remote system so it runs with the exact same speed as if they were in the office. All that is sent over the internet is mouse and keyboard movements. Email, web surfing, QuickBooks – all tested and working great.
How did we save $5500? We kept Mavidea employees working Tuesday and Wednesday – from their homes. $5500 is a rough number Mavidea payroll saved by employees still being productive during the snow storm. We told those employees that live out of town to not even bother trying to come in on Tuesday (the snow started Monday night) and we sent everyone who lived in town home early Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday our offices were completely empty.
With this one-two punch, our technical staff was taking phone calls and working tickets all day long. Sales was calling on prospects and setting appointments. Marketing was working on wonderful things like this blog. Web development and search engine optimization were making customer websites beautiful, functional, and appealing to potential clients. The only person not working at 100% was COO Jake Davis, because Chenoa lost all Comcast Internet. So we kept getting messages from him via cell phone.
Couple more quick thoughts before I wrap this post up:
- How much in goodwill did we save? Our customers called in and got help when they needed it. Some of our customers in other parts of the US didn’t get hit by the storm and worked those days. We were still available to help them. How do I put a price tag on that?
- Blizzards aren’t the only use. Mavidea CEO Erik Barnlund and his wife Bridget just had a baby in January (congrats guys!). Erik worked from home for 2 weeks so he could be with Bridget and Rowan as much as possible.
- What about when people are sick? This setup also allows us to encourage workers who are not feeling well to just work from home so they don’t get the rest of the office sick.
If this sort of setup is appealing to you, let me know. We can handle the server configuration easily, and while Mavidea is not a telephone provider (yet), we have great partners in Central Illinois who we work with to make sure everything works correctly so that when disaster strikes, you can be sure your employees are safe and still productive.
Stay warm!
Jamie
