DES Architects
I didn’t want to put a phone switch in there. Another consideration for the system was compatibility with Google apps. Some of our employees have hundreds, or even thousands, of contacts in Google. It wouldn’t make sense for them to have to transfer those to a phone.
DES Architects + Engineers (DES) is the #1 architecture firm in the Silicon Valley according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal. DES’s Moffett Gateway project in Sunnyvale, leased in its entirety by Google, is a good example of why the firm achieved this ranking. The 628,000-square-foot LEED Platinum tech campus, which includes acres of ground-level green spaces and a two-acre rooftop park, won the Silicon Valley Business Journal award for Best Office Deal and was a finalist for the Best Green Project.
DES recently opened a new office in San Francisco’s Financial District. The new, 3,800-square-foot location brings multiple advantages, most importantly a convenient place to collaborate with San Francisco and North Bay clients. With DES’s expertise in what many are calling the “Silicon Valley style,” the firm is using this office to attract the new generation of technology startups in San Francisco.
Communications to match the mission
Rob Sampson is DES’s Director of Information Technology. When he was planning the San Francisco office’s IT infrastructure, one of his goals was to support employees’ mobility. Mobility is important because employees often travel to job sites and clients’ offices, and the firm was already a 100% laptop shop at its Redwood City headquarters.
Another goal for the new office was to use as many cloud-based services as possible. Sampson had already started moving applications to the cloud in the Redwood City office, such as the migration three years ago from an on-prem Exchange server to Google G Suite. “I’m a strong proponent of cloud,” he says. “Whatever we can get in the cloud, I’m in favor of it.”
Sampson applied these parameters—cloud-based, support for mobility—to the San Francisco office’s business communications system. “I didn’t want to put a phone switch in there,” he says. Another consideration for the system was compatibility with Google apps. “Some of our employees have hundreds, or even thousands, of contacts in Google,” he explains. “It wouldn’t make sense for them to have to transfer those to a phone.”
Google integration boosts productivity
Sampson chose RingCentral as the business communications solution for the San Francisco office. RingCentral met his requirements for being cloud-based, and it supports employees’ mobility through the RingCentral Mobile app that they can install on their smartphones.
In addition, RingCentral communications functionality operates seamlessly with Google apps. In fact, RingCentral is included in the Recommended by Google G Suite program, due to its high security, reliability, and quality of integration with Google business tools.
Aggie Revane, IDA, is an interior designer working in DES’s San Francisco office. Chrome is always open on her laptop, for both research and Gmail. With RingCentral, she can click on a phone number in an email to automatically make a call, or use the RingCentral dialpad that’s right there within the browser when she sees something she wants to follow up on by phone. “I see the productivity benefits of the RingCentral and Google integration,” Revane says.
With RingCentral, DES’s new San Francisco office is actually ahead of the headquarters in terms of communications functionality.
Sampson’s plan is to deploy RingCentral there as well.