Zodiac Aerospace
Replacing Multiple Legacy Communications Systems with a RingCentral Unified Solution
[Since the RingCentral app deployment,] I’ve seen a 30% drop in our email usage, which clearly means our employees have found the RingCentral team messaging app a better way to communicate.
Erwin Edillon
Manager of Information Systems, Zodiac Aerospace
Zodiac Inflight Innovations (Zii) is the onboard entertainment and Wi-Fi solution provider of choice for nearly 50 commercial airlines, providing in-seat screens, Wi-Fi streaming to personal devices, and other inflight solutions.
Airlines are among the most demanding customers in the world, requiring a high level of interaction and collaboration with customers and team members. As a result, Zii needed a communications system that was not only reliable but made collaboration easy for its employees around the world—without becoming a runaway cost center. When Zii’s legacy on-premises phone system began nearing end of life, the company took the opportunity to research the potential benefits of consolidating its phone and other communications systems, such as video conferencing, team messaging, and file sharing, into a unified platform. That search led to RingCentral.
INDUSTRY
Travel and
Hospitality
HQ
Brea, California
YEAR FOUNDED
1996
EMPLOYEES
500+
Aging on-premises PBX triggers a search for a better unified communications solution
The technology team at Zii had two primary motivations to begin investigating a cloud-based communications solution for their global enterprise. In addition to replacing their end-of-life PBX system, they hoped to leverage their new communications platform to boost, improve customer service, enhance their team’s efficiency and productivity, and lower cost.
“The major catalyst was that our senior leadership was worried that the current set of disparate solutions was not meeting the business need, along with the risks of the aging PBX failing and having immediate operational problems,” recalls Erwin Edillon, the company’s Manager of Information Systems.
“We have locations in the US and in Germany, as well as dozens of remote workers in various geographical locations. Our staff was using several different apps for chat and several others for online meetings, which made collaboration difficult. Half of our engineering team used one chat app, for example, and the other half used something different.”
“When I dove deeper into the cloud communications players out there, I discovered RingCentral and realized we could accomplish our goal of unifying to a single solution, which would also help us achieve our bigger business objectives: better communication and collaboration with our customers—pull from the top.”
After evaluating options and vetting vendors, Zii chooses RingCentral’s cloud communications and collaboration solution.
Edillon and his team researched various solutions and evaluated them according to the team’s top requirements: user experience, global reach, call quality, cost, and ease of deployment.
“I personally vetted various options at our offices with a small pilot group,” Edillon explains, “and RingCentral was the clear choice.”
“During that vetting process we saw how much our staff would be able to do from a single unified solution—voice, team messaging, file sharing, online video meetings. We realized this was the enterprise communications platform for us. Our pilot group was also impressed by how quick and easy it would be to roll this out and scale it up to the whole global enterprise.”
RingCentral is also helping us reduce costs in a number of ways. We’re saving particularly on international calls, which represented about half of our bill with the legacy system. We’ve been able to phase out the chat app that we were paying for, thanks to the RingCentral team messaging app. Also, because we’re using RingCentral Meetings, we’re phasing out the other online meeting apps we were paying for.
Erwin Edillon
Manager of Information Systems, Zodiac Aerospace
RingCentral is generating significant benefits for Zii
“By migrating to RingCentral,” Edillon says, “we’ve been able to consolidate our disparate communications systems into one seamless solution, which has been great for our staff’s productivity and efficiency. The users who have RingEX can make calls and launch meetings from anywhere. Thanks to the RingCentral app, our users are now also able to communicate from anywhere at any time, using any device they prefer. That has made it easier for our teams to work together, including our teams that are distributed around the world. Since the RingCentral deployment, I’ve seen a 30% drop in our email usage, which clearly means our employees have found the RingCentral team messaging app a better way to communicate.”
“RingCentral is also helping us reduce costs in a number of ways,” Edillon adds. “We’re saving particularly on international calls, which represented about half of our bill with the legacy system. We’ve been able to phase out the chat app that we were paying for, thanks to the RingCentral team messaging app. Also, because we’re using RingCentral Meetings, we’re phasing out the other online meeting apps we were paying for. That’s going to save us a substantial amount of money.”
“Also, thanks to RingCentral’s open API platform and app integrations, we’re even receiving notifications from other apps right in our RingCentral communication streams,” Edillon explains. “My team uses JIRA ticket-tracking system, for example, and now every JIRA IT ticket comes straight into my RingCentral platform thread. That is a big deal, because it lets me communicate with my team directly in the messaging app, so we don’t have to keep going back out to JIRA to update each other or check on the ticket status—or worse, use email.”
“What has particularly impressed me is that the RingCentral solution puts all of the communications capabilities our team needs into one place, which works across all of our devices. We’ve got phone calls, team messaging, file sharing, task management, a built-in calendar, online meetings—everything our team needs to make communication simple and smooth with our customers and employees distributed all over the world.”