The Broad Institute

Business Size: 1200+
Industry: Genomic Medicine
Products: ShoreTel, XO
Customer Since: 2009

Boston Wireless deploys ShoreTel UC System at The Broad Institute in Cambridge.

Key Challenges:

• The first challenge was to address the drawbacks and benefits of moving off of the MIT phone system.
• Second was to implement a system which could be managed by the existing IT staff.  The existing platform was managed by the MIT IT staff.
• Third, to determine appropriate voice connectivity mix for inbound and outbound calling.
• Fourth, develop an acceptable plan to rollout 1200 IP phones seamlessly.

Benefits:

• Immediate cost savings moving from the managed service relationship with MIT
• Reliability - utilizing each location as its own site and as backup to the others.
• Single unified platform for all employees to transfer and make calls
• Easy to grow, adding sites and employees with their own staff.
• Ease and speed of the implementation process with Boston Wireless

Company profile: The Cambridge, MA-based Broad Institute brings together world-class faculty, researchers, students and professional staff from across the MIT and Harvard communities and beyond, to identify and overcome the most critical obstacles to realizing the full promise of genomic medicine. Continued contributions and a secure endowment let the institute expand from its first facilities into a second seven-story building, housing office, research laboratory, retail and museum space, along with two other buildings.

Challenge: With its rapid expansion, the institute quickly outgrew its shared phone system. To help streamline communications and reduce costs, Broad needed an easy-to-manage, feature-rich unified communications system. When it became a full 501(c)3 research organization in 2009, Broad Institute decided to implement a new phone system.

Solution: A ShoreTel UC system with redundant switches in four separate buildings to ensure reliability and access to voicemail, about 1,200 ShorePhone® IP phones: models110, 230 and 265, plus analog lines and conference phones.

Launched after more than a decade of informal and successful research among young scientists in the MIT and Harvard communities, the Broad Institute has a genetic predisposition to successful research. Thanks to the visionary philanthropic investment of Eli and Edythe L. Broad, the institute has been researching genomic approaches human disease since 2004, playing a leading role in important international studies such as the Human Genome Project and The Cancer Genome Atlas.

Today, the Broad Institute has grown into a world-class collaborative, cross-disciplinary research organization with more than 1,500 employees, associates and researchers around the world. To foster open communication and keep knowledge flowing among its collaborators and associates, the Broad Institute relies on a ShoreTel unified communications (UC) system.

When the Broad Institute moved to 501(c)3 status in 2009, the institute decided to install its own phone system. "We wanted a phone system that is easy for busy scientists to use and simple for our IT staff to manage," explained Broad Institute's Manager of IT Business Operations, Stan Diamond. "Our goal was to choose a single vendor who could design the system, install and implement it, and provide on-going support so we could focus on providing resources to support research, rather than a complex, time-consuming communications system."

ShoreTel offers the right DNA for savings and simplicity

Broad quickly narrowed its choices to two vendors, deciding ultimately to go with the ShoreTel technology.

For the first phase of its ShoreTel implementation, Mr. Diamond’s goal was simply to replace the old ISDN phone system with a voice over IP (VoIP) system, providing familiar functionality and operation across the institute’s four separate buildings. "The ShoreTel deployment was completely seamless for users," Mr. Diamond said. "We were impressed by how smooth and easy the rollout was."

Pairing streamlined voice communications with improved productivity

From the start, ShoreTel's voicemail integration significantly improved communications across the Broad Institute's extended enterprise. ShoreWare® Operator Call Manger enables the Institute to manage incoming calls more efficiently, while integration with Broad’s Unix e-mail system gives users voicemail visibility. "ShoreTel's voicemail options make it easy for people to have voicemail emailed as a .wav file or to simply be notified via e-mail that voicemail has been received," explained Mr. Diamond. "This saves a lot of time because people don't have to make a separate call just to check voicemail."

Staff also appreciates that they can use ShoreTel's directory on the phone itself and simply dial by name. Four-digit dialing between offices means touching base with the right person is now quick and convenient, and like all other employees, Mr. Diamond can easily forward his desk phone to his cell phone, so that he can quickly be found when needed

ShoreTel's built-in workgroup feature helps several of the Institute’s administrative groups streamline efficiency, Mr. Diamond said. "We use workgroups to ensure that calls are answered by ringing phones in a sequence or on all phones.

Since domestic and international conference calls are a regular activity, the Broad Institute uses ShorePhone® 230 IP phones for high quality small conference calls. ShoreTel ShorePhones have also delivered a noticeable improvement in audio quality over previous equipment, noted Mr. Diamond. "These features save time for everybody and improve productivity across the board."

A backbone for plug and play system management

When an institution makes as much progress as the Broad Institute in just the last year, ease of management and expansion is critical.  Mr. Diamond estimates that over the five-year lease and support of their ShoreTel system, they will be able to realize significant savings, compared with the costs of their previous system.

Under the old phone system, any time a staff member moved, they had to put in a request, and schedule a technician to run or connect the wires. However, the ShoreTel UC system provides a single image of the entire architecture through an intuitive Web-based interface. As a result, moves, adds and changes are as simple as drag and drop, and integrating additional buildings, offices and labs is a requirement an be easily handled without disrupting operations.

Recently, almost 100 people at the Broad Institute moved from one building to another, and the move was completed in one weekend. All staff had to do was carry their phones to their new locations, plug them in and pick right up where they left off.

Broad Institute’s role as the nexus for so many critical biomedical projects around the world makes reliable communications systems critical to its scientific mission. ShoreTel’s distributed architecture enables the Institute to ensure uninterrupted service with redundant servers in separate buildings. Because ShoreTel equipment is distributed throughout the Institute's locations, traffic can be re-routed in the event of network failures, and voicemail and communications can continue. At the same time, ShoreTel's distributed architecture also plays to another Broad need, scalability for future growth.