Like many businesses that scale rapidly to meet demand, NCI built out its IT infrastructure organically, on an as-needed basis. When the company opened offices in a new location, its management teams were focused on hiring the right people and serving clients—not on which phone system to deploy.
But as NCI CIO Vasili Ikonomidis explained, this led to technical challenges when it came to the company’s communications environment. “Eventually we found ourselves with different levels of service, from different vendors, all over the country,” he said.
Ikonomidis pointed out that the company’s telephony infrastructure was built around an on-premises system that his team was managing at headquarters in Reston, Virginia. He notes that this created two operational challenges. The first was a lack of reliability and functionality.
“The on-premises system needed a lot of maintenance,” he said. “We sometimes had outages, and it took a lot of work making even minor adjustments.”
A second problem, he explained, was cost. “We had no centralized telephony invoicing, because we were paying so many different bills every month for phone, internet, faxing, and other services.”
When they investigated the company’s telephony infrastructure closely, Ikonomidis and his team knew they’d need to move to a cloud solution. For the interim period, though, they looked for a short-term fix to keep their legacy system functional. But that experience further underscored the urgency to find a more modern, scalable cloud solution.
“It was definitely time to move on, he said.”