Microsoft Office System Customer Solution Case Study Global Commodities Company Saves on Travel Costs with Unified Communications Overview Country or Region: Australia Industry: Manufacturing Mining Customer Profile Melbourne, Australia-based BHP Billiton is the world s largest diversified resource company with 39,000 employees in 25 countries. It has interests in a wide range of assets, including petroleum. Business Situation Diverse solutions for telephony and conferencing among offices made it difficult for BHP Billiton to track costs and keep content secure while employees collaborated across the globe. Solution BHP Billiton deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to create a unified-communications solution to support internally hosted Web conferencing. Benefits Improved operational costs Increased productivity Reduced travel and conferencing costs Higher quality Rapid deployment Because Office Communications Server 2007 lends itself to so many different scenarios, I can say with a high degree of confidence that it has a positive impact on the total costs. Dr Ian Hoyle, Principal Architect Technology, Enterprise IT Strategy Group, BHP Billiton BHP Billiton is the world s largest diversified resources company. It has 39,000 employees working in 25 countries worldwide and returned a profit of U.S.$13.7 billion (excluding exceptional items) in fiscal year 2007. With global operations demanding frequent inter-office communications, the company found itself hindered by a range of different systems and protocols, and poor call quality from its many remote offices. To consolidate its online meetings solutions worldwide, the company turned to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to deliver an integrated communications solution to improve collaboration and communication for its employees. With highly secure content sharing, software-based voice over IP capability, and integrated presence management, the new environment creates a unified communications solution that helps reduce long-distance call costs and travel budgets, and removes company dependence on hardware-based IP telephony solutions.
We knew intuitively that voice-conferencing functionality combined with highly secure online content sharing would strike a chord with people in our business. Dr Ian Hoyle, Principal Architect Technology, Enterprise IT Strategy Group, BHP Billiton Situation BHP Billiton is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, and is the world s largest diversified resources company. It has leading positions in aluminum, energy and metallurgical coal, copper, manganese, iron ore, uranium, nickel, silver, and titanium ores and metals. The company also has interests in oil, gas, liquefied natural gas, and diamonds. It has a U.S.$200 billion dollar market capitalization, and employs 39,000 employees in more than 100 operations in 25 countries. One of the company s ongoing challenges was finding a single, consistent solution to voice-conferencing needs for its globally distributed staff. Because we re such a large company working across so many countries, we constantly have online meetings and conferences with distributed groups of staff and customers, says Dr Ian Hoyle, Principal Architect Technology, Enterprise IT Strategy Group, BHP Billiton. Employees were using a large and diverse range of conferencing solutions procured by individual business units and companies within BHP Billiton. We were not only using a variety of third-party services, but also solutions from different local telcos in each market in addition to using global players like Microsoft and WebEx, notes Hoyle. We knew we were making a lot of calls and meetings online, but we had no visibility of the total cost. Hoyle adds that many calls were outside the control of the IT department and often made on an ad-hoc basis. Another problem was the generally poor voice quality of local telecom operators in some of the more remote countries where BHP Billiton has offices, especially in parts of South America and Africa. heads that would use their own service providers, making it even harder to measure the costs and usage. In addition, sensitive information, in formats such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation graphics program files, was also routinely shared during these calls, giving rise to security concerns. We knew intuitively that voice-conferencing functionality combined with highly secure online content sharing would strike a chord with people in our business, says Hoyle. What we needed was an on-premise conferencing (audio, video, and Web) capability with file sharing that would be flexible enough to cater to a myriad of scenarios and needs across our global operations. The solution BHP Billiton wanted had to offer high-quality voice telephony, allow for highly secure uploading of sensitive data, and had to be deployable internally to allow usage tracking and the management of consumption. So, in late 2005, the company investigated several options that would bring it improved online meetings and voice communications but at the same time would integrate with existing systems and be easy to use. Solution Acknowledging the variety of solutions available in the market, BHP Billiton chose Microsoft principally because of its ability to link into existing systems and applications. We re very focused on Microsoft Office within our organization, so we thought Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 was bound to be a good fit because it would seamlessly integrate with our existing Office applications, says Hoyle. Gary Buck, Chief Information Officer, BHP Billiton Aluminium, says, Some calls were made by personal assistants to department Having successfully deployed Office Live Communications Server 2005 several years earlier, BHP Billiton made the decision to
implement Office Communications Server 2007 as the environment for online meetings within the company. After discussions with Microsoft in late November 2005, and with assistance from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), the deployment began in early February 2006. Office Communications Server 2007 was installed side-by-side with Live Communications Server 2005 to ensure a smooth transition to the new environment. Says Hoyle, We have transitioned to the new platform over a period of 12 months. The solution was deployed in a consolidated topology with three Hewlett Packard blade servers behind hardware load balancers. Edge servers, used for external meeting scenarios, are deployed in an Internet gateway to mediate traffic between clients and servers, and help use existing bandwidth and system resources more efficiently. A voice pilot was established at Worley Alumina, a BHP Billiton Aluminium Customer Sector Group (CSG) business, located in Collie, Australia. The Aluminium CSG is scattered all over the globe with operations in Suriname, Mozambique, South Africa, and Brazil, to name just a few, says Buck. The general existing voice quality from the local telecom operators in these countries is poor, so it was an interesting challenge to run the trial with this particular group. The trial was limited to 100 users, some of whom already used a Cisco Call Manager IP telephony solution. This required little modification to integrate with Office Communications Server 2007. I think the voice capabilities of Office Communications Server 2007 were the most complex part of the deployment only because it was brand new technology for us, adds Buck, but the installation was simple and straightforward with little impact on our existing setup. A single mediation server, which is the technology that provides Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) interoperability for Office Communications Server 2007, was installed at the Worsley office where a Cisco gateway was in place. One of the more illuminating aspects of the deployment was the flexibility of the handsets and speakerphone devices. We were pleased that we did not have to stick to traditional handset solutions, says Hoyle. We were able to deploy Polycom CX700 IP phone and Polycom CX200 USB handsets as well as Polycom CX100 speakerphones, and Microsoft RoundTable conferencing and collaboration devices. The use of these devices is helping us rethink the possibilities of using the voice component across some of our operations, he adds. In addition, presence management, where an indicator button signals an employee s availability, helps workers choose the best way to contact the person they are messaging. BHP Billiton expects that Microsoft RoundTable (with its attractive price point) will have a significant impact on the way in which its employees think about group conferencing, especially in bridging colocated groups and remote groups. RoundTable devices, with their 360-degree camera and active microphone detection, are ideal for large-number conferences that BHP Billiton sets up between its offices and the more distant operating locations. BHP Billiton has now decommissioned Live Communications Server 2005 and has moved all global users to Office Communications Server 2007 within weeks of the product being released to market. Benefits By deploying Office Communications Server 2007, BHP Billiton was able to consolidate its telephony operations and offer its staff
Having a consistent tool like Office Communications Server 2007 for everyone to use across the business was a strategic advantage for us. Gary Buck, Chief Information Officer, BHP Billiton Aluminium improved voice communications and online meetings, all within a simple, unified user experience. BHP Billiton employees now have a fully integrated environment they can access through a single interface (Office Communicator 2007), which is quick and intuitive to learn. With on-premise conferencing and single-product, softwarebased security built-in, Office Communications Server 2007 significantly reduces overall communications costs, eases management, and improves response times and security. Improved Operational Costs A key goal for BHP Billiton was to take advantage of its existing investment across its global data network. Having a consistent tool like Office Communications Server 2007 for everyone to use across the business was a strategic advantage for us, says Buck. By deploying Office Communications Server 2007 internally to host its voice and conferencing capabilities, BHP Billiton has been able to improve operational costs by reducing its dependence on hardware-based IP PBX solutions, separate phone directories, and more. Increased Productivity A critical value of Office Communications Server 2007 for BHP Billiton is the use of presence management. Presence management helps remote workers to be visible to each other, and flags their availability or presence. The presence of a team worker can be critical when a timesensitive business has to be made. I think we definitely attained a better understanding of the value of presence within our organization since deploying the Office Communications Server 2007 solution, says Hoyle. With distributed groups, it is important to know where people are and when they are available. This helps open communication, saves time, and improves decision making. BHP Billiton has already seen a change to the way it conducts meetings. The degree of control now in the hands of the presenter, as well as the use of audio/video devices such as Web cams, headsets, and Microsoft RoundTable with active speaker video and panorama video, changes the meeting dynamics, notes Hoyle. Using one-click dialing, users can call anyone inside the company, whether they know the number or not, saving both time and expense. Using Office Communicator 2007, users can simply locate the recipient s name within the entire company directory. Then they can connect using the medium of choice e-mail message, instant messaging (IM), voice or video at the click of a mouse. The Office Communications Server 2007 environment provides a single point of contact that has helped streamline communications and simplified management of previously separate data streams and different hardware environments such as IM, voice mail, and proprietary audio and video conferencing. Reduced Travel and Conferencing Costs On-premise conferencing capabilities have had a positive impact on cost savings for BHP Billiton. Like any large organization, we have significant cost pressure to reduce our travel budget, notes Buck. Using Office Communications Server 2007, the company can now introduce an internal-conferencing solution and reduce its dependence on thirdparty solutions like WebEx. This will reduce travel, eliminate external conferencing, and save on long-distance call costs. Says Hoyle, There are obvious potential costs savings, but what is even harder to quantify is the improved value to the business. Because Office Communications Server 2007 lends itself to so many different
scenarios, it has a really positive impact on total costs. One of our groups saved more than U.S.$10,000 on just one meeting. Normally participants would have flown in, attended the meeting, and stayed overnight. Instead they ran a Microsoft Office Live Meeting session using a RoundTable device at the central location and cameras at some of the other end points. They rated this as a huge success. Better Quality As well as the ease of connecting to users, BHP Billiton was immediately impressed with the voice quality. As a rule, people are surprised by the voice quality compared to even existing PSTN systems, notes Hoyle. In places like Suriname and Mozambique, the voice quality is superior to what we had before using PSTN voice lines. In many instances, audio quality from RoundTable was perceived to be better than the previous conferencing option used. In addition, the panoramic video display delivered by RoundTable within the Live Meeting console, and its tracking capability both improve remote meeting quality. As people talk and move about, the RoundTable system tracks changes in speakers and their location, says Hoyle. The other people in the meetings give us really positive feedback on the system. Rapid Deployment The quality of service and access for users is higher than with other, separate systems because deployment to new staff is a simple one-stop deployment of all services. Once access to the required levels of functionality (e-mail, IM, video, voice, and telephony) have been sanctioned by management, the IT department can instantly configure Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 to give that user full access. This saves setup time, is easier to apply consistent standards to, and gives users faster access to the new functionality.
For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com Microsoft Office System The Microsoft Office system is the business world s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact. For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to: www.microsoft.com/office For more information about BHP Billiton products and services, call (61) 1300 55 47 57 or visit the Web site at: www.bhpbilliton.com Software and Services Microsoft Office Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Hardware Polycom CX700 IP phones Polycom CX100 speakerphones Palm Treo smartphones Polycom CX200 USB handsets Microsoft RoundTable Partners Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published October 2007