OVERVIEW

This City of Los Angeles case study is based on the same cloud-based unified communications platform as Digitel's Temovi cloud unified communications network. To date, the City of Los Angeles has over 16,000 subscribers installed on Ribbon's KBS Cloud.

The City of Los Angeles municipality, which proudly serves the city's residents and businesses, includes more than 50,000 employees and has more than 40 departments. It's no surprise that delivering communications services to employees of one of the world's largest cities is a demanding task as different departments have different missions and requirements. Whether the mission is primarily administrative or supporting the city's first responders, reliable and effective communications are critical.

THE CHALLENGE

Historically, the City of Los Angeles was managing more than 35 large PBX systems and hundreds of small key systems in local offices and departments. Much of this equipment was aging and operated in separate islands, forcing citizens and staff to dial from location to location to find the right group or individual. Services varied widely between sites and even basic functions operated differently depending on the age and model of equipment.

Rather than go through a major capital purchasing program and a massive upgrade process, the City of Los Angeles made a strategic decision that it wanted to extract itself from maintaining and managing its communications hardware.

The City of Los Angeles needed a carrier-grade solution that was scalable and reliable enough to support its needs. Their strategic goal is to integrate all of the disparate locations and departments so employees can better collaborate and citizens can rapidly connect to the right team or individual. The new solution had to support the latest UC services as well as traditional features. The latter helps the City minimize the impact of upgrades on existing business processes. Financially, it had to be extremely cost effective.

THE SOLUTION

The City turned to Ribbon's Kandy Business Solutions (KBS) cloud to provide its employees with the latest unified communications, collaboration, mobility and voicemail capabilities. KBS' cloud deployment model delivers the City of Los Angeles many benefits including a practical way to migrate individual departments or locations, without disrupting other users. The City only pays for what it uses, there's no need to buy excess capacity or worry about how changing requirements will impact purchasing decisions. Eliminating legacy premises PBX hardware reduced the City's power and real estate costs, offered built-in redundancy and eliminated the need for one-time technology refreshes.

Kandy delivers a common user experience across all of the City's sites, reduces power and real estate costs, provides built-in redundancy and eliminates maintenance and technology refresh requirements. The City is also embracing the mobility, anywhere access and collaboration tools in Ribbon's Smart Office UC clients. Smart Office clients can be used in lieu of a hard phone or as a synergistic piece of a UC solution. Smart Office makes it easier for employees to stay connected and respond to critical situations.

Ribbon shares its heritage with legacy Nortel equipment, which was a large component of the City of Los Angeles communications networks, so Ribbon is uniquely qualified to migrate these and other networks to cloud-based UC capabilities. KBS also allowed the City to migrate various sites at its own pace. Not having to rip out and replace its old system and the company's proven carrier-grade solutions were significant factors in the decision to go with Ribbon.

THE RESULT

Kandy Business Solutions enable the City of Los Angeles to replace its legacy communications networks with state-of-the-art, cloudbased technology that provides its employees the ability to communicate in real time via voice, video conference, text or web conference.

The solution operates on PCs, Macs, smartphones (via KBS's Smart Office clients), Polycom's open SIP phones, and even the web. Employees have better access to communications, whether they are at their desk, another city office or on the road.

Due to the success of the upgrade program, in 2017 the Los Angeles Public Library, the second largest public library system in the United States, also selected KBS technology to enhance its communications and collaboration capabilities for its Central Library location and across its 72 branches. The LA Public Library deployment includes Kandy Alert System services that deliver real time site-by-site or system-wide notifications for critical events including weather emergencies, lost children and acts of violence. Administrators can securely logon and send alerts to employees at one or multiple sites depending on circumstances and severity.