Vivint Solar Goes All-In with Webex Collaboration
The Customer Story blog series highlights how Cisco’s collaboration technology has helped customers solve their business challenges. Learn how Cisco is meeting customers where they are helping them achieve their business goals.
Vivint Solar Adopts Full Cisco Webex Collaboration Suite
Vivint Solar’s journey to cloud collaboration began five years ago, after an acquisition by Blackstone. At the time, their IT team started to evaluate the network infrastructure and did a 5-year ROI on what it would cost to take their existing technologies to the cloud. They quickly realized that they could drastically reduce headcount and maintenance cost of what it was taking to currently manage their on-premises voice and telephony infrastructure by switching to a cloud solution.
When beginning their search for vendors, Vivint Solar believed every public cloud provider was created equal, and so they went with a piecemeal solution of several vendors to provide for their collaboration needs. As Vivint Solar began experiencing outages, performance issues, and a lack of follow-through on roadmap promises with these vendors, they soon realized that the problems would continue to persist and they may have made the wrong decision. It was definitely time to switch to a new platform. Read the Case Study
True Unified Communications
When evaluating companies for the second time, Vivint Solar wanted to make sure they didn’t have to reevaluate a third time. “Switching to the cloud is a major undertaking, and to do it two times in two years is something you want to avoid”, said Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar. This time around, they knew they needed to focus on more than just the technical criteria; they had to consider factors like financial stability and size of the cloud provider, to ensure they had the resources to continue to invest in their solutions.
At the time, Vivint Solar’s partner, Veracity Networks, was beginning to work with Cisco and that’s when Vivint Solar saw an opportunity to replace all of their solutions with a single platform. Vivint Solar was attracted to Cisco for its entire suite of collaboration products that could provide everything Vivint was looking for.
Vivint Solar consolidated their collaboration technologies around Cisco Webex, adopting Webex Calling, Webex Contact Center, Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, and even Webex room devices for their video endpoints. “Instead of having eight or nine technology vendors, we could literally have one company provide us everything; true unified communications,” says Hincks. Vivint Solar uses Webex company-wide and worldwide – across their many customer service centers, including their Utah headquarters.
Unparalleled Experience
Vivint Solar has been surprised by how easy it’s been to manage and maintain their solution centrally with Cisco Webex Control Hub and have been able to drastically reduce the IT headcount required to run their global telephony network – from 18 employees to just one.
Since adopting the full Cisco Webex collaboration suite, Vivint Solar is truly unified for the first time in company history. “Bringing all of our collaboration tools together in the cloud with Cisco Webex has delivered an unparalleled experience. The ability to have our entire company switch to work-from-home overnight while allowing our IT team to seamlessly support our global operations is enhancing our business continuity strategy and the dynamics of our interactions. Webex is playing an integral role in keeping work flowing during these unprecedented times.”
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Learn more about Cisco’s Collaboration solutions
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